Obama's Katrina!

[Magyar]

Obama taking more critique here than BP, strange.

No not really. The repugnican position as demonstrated so well in this thread and the links has ALWAYS been and forever be that personal responsibility ONLY applies to
moral and social behavior they don't approve of - or at least don't participate in (unless it's in secret) and if something goes wrong then it is always a Democrats fault.


So when Dems want to put more control or tax corps more they are evil, but when those same corps screw us and the world al bp oil spill Then HEY BP's personal responsibility goes out the window and it's the Dem's (Obama's) fault for not fixing it!

You see this in Florida ALL the time - higher insurance for hurricanes, build higher quality houses, don't build on the beach - HOW dare the Ebil gobmint tell us how to live.

Same houses get washed away - WHERE is the Fed govt. to help us out?

 

[NoScotsman]

Applying rationalism is silly when it comes to politics and public opinion --neither one is rational. The President gets blamed if it rains on the 4th of July. However, I expect Obama will avoid too much criticism ... as he's pretty slick himself.

Also, FWIW ... my brother was the head industrial/organizational safety specialist for BP on the North Slope between 2002-2008. Until recently he worked for MMS, quitting just two months before this disaster because of safety concerns regarding (wait for it...) off-shore drilling.

Basically, no one was listening to his advice, so he quit. He doesn't have many kind things to say about his time in government. Regarding BP, he says the safety on the North Slope was good, but he knows little about the Gulf operation as this was after his association with them.

 

[andyandy]

Also, FWIW ... my brother was the head industrial/organizational safety specialist for BP on the North Slope between 2002-2008. Until recently he worked for MMS, quitting just two months before this disaster because of safety concerns regarding (wait for it...) off-shore drilling.

Basically, no one was listening to his advice, so he quit. He doesn't have many kind things to say about his time in government. Regarding BP, he says the safety on the North Slope was good, but he knows little about the Gulf operation as this was after his association with them.

interesting.

 

[Travis]

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.

No, they did not and you are right about misplaced blame. I felt at the time that Bush was being some sort of whipping boy for the Katrina debacle. I was just pointing out that in Katrina there were government screwups, even if mostly on a local level, while I'm not sure what could have been done to mitigate the oil well blowout, once it had happened, better than what's been tried.

 

[WildCat]

Of course hurricanes are tracked before they hit land making a lack of preparation for them inexcusable

Except you don't know exactly where it will hit until it actually hits. And even if you did know you wouldn't send all your resources into the area you expect to be hit, unless you don't mind the hurricane destroying all that also.

The Katrina issue was the fact that people either wouldn't or couldn't leave. Focusing on the aftermath is really counterproductive, because what should be the focus is finding ways to either enable and/or coerce people into evacuating an expected hurricane rather than trying to mitigate the disastrous results of a failure to do so.

Of course, such plans go to hell after a few false alarm evacuations, when the hurricane veers off the expected course as they often do and real economic damage is also done by unnecessary evacuations.

You're damned if you do, damned if you don't.

 

[Unabogie]

The meme of everything being "Obama's Katrina" just underscores the fact that most of the right (and some in the media) honestly don't understand why what Bush did was bad.

No one should blame Bush for the hurricane happening or for it causing damage. What they blamed him for was that he did not mobilize anyone to help the people who were clearly in need of help (and in fact organized a PR push to blame people like *Mayor Nagin). Think Progress did a devastating timeline:

http://thinkprogress.org/katrina-timeline

The public was presented with images of people begging for help, and of a federal response that ignored them. It was never about the limits of government, but about the failure of Bush and his people to become engaged.

So far, President Obama hasn't come close to this.

*I'm very tempted to ask why mayors are no longer considered responsible for stopping national disasters as they were in 2005? I have a friend who is also a Teabagger, and back then he was very adamant that the Mayor had primary responsibility in cases such as hurricanes. I told him this was a pretty novel idea, and it seems to have gone away. I bet no one here can even name the Mayors and Parish Presidents involved in this.

 

[WildCat]

*I'm very tempted to ask why mayors are no longer considered responsible for stopping national disasters as they were in 2005? I have a friend who is also a Teabagger, and back then he was very adamant that the Mayor had primary responsibility in cases such as hurricanes. I told him this was a pretty novel idea, and it seems to have gone away. I bet no one here can even name the Mayors and Parish Presidents involved in this.

Since when do oil rigs have mayors?

 

[andyandy]

Applying rationalism is silly when it comes to politics and public opinion --neither one is rational. The President gets blamed if it rains on the 4th of July. However, I expect Obama will avoid too much criticism ... as he's pretty slick himself.

Also, FWIW ... my brother was the head industrial/organizational safety specialist for BP on the North Slope between 2002-2008. Until recently he worked for MMS, quitting just two months before this disaster because of safety concerns regarding (wait for it...) off-shore drilling.

Basically, no one was listening to his advice, so he quit. He doesn't have many kind things to say about his time in government. Regarding BP, he says the safety on the North Slope was good, but he knows little about the Gulf operation as this was after his association with them.

In today's papers..

Papers obtained by the New York Times show that issues were raised as far back as last June. The problems involved the well casing and blowout preventer, considered critical pieces in the chain of events that led to the disaster.

On 22 June last year, BP engineers were worried that the casing the company wanted to use might collapse under high pressure. "This would certainly be a worst-case scenario," Mark Hafle, a senior drilling engineer at BP, warned in an internal report. "However, I have seen it happen so know it can occur."

The company went ahead with the casing, but only after getting special permission because it violated safety policies and design standards, the New York Times reported.

Hafle, testifying before a panel in Louisiana on Friday about the cause of the rig disaster, rejected the notion that BP had taken risks. He declined to comment on the leaked report.

Last night BP admitted the best hope of stemming the flow completely could take a further two months, using relief wells. BP's chief operations officer, Doug Suttles, admitted: "We have not been able to stop the flow … This scares everybody, the fact that we can't make this well stop flowing, the fact that we haven't succeeded so far."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/30/bp-gulf-oil-spill-obama

I wonder who gave "special permission"? Bet they're busy building themselves a bunker....

 

[Dorian Gray]

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.

A lack of preparation for oil rig explosions is still inexcusable. Not as predictable, but still inexcusable. I mean, no one knows when an accident will happen, or they'll get sick, or their house will burn down, but they still have plans in place.

 

[JohnnyG]

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.

I would like to see existing policies and regulations actually followed. Here are some things the government (I never mentioned Obama) did to drop the ball.

- Inspectors with the MMS accepted gifts (hunting and fishing trips and tickets to football games) from companies operating offshore oil rigs.
- Companies were allowed to fill out their own inspection forms, using pencil, with the inspector tracing over it later in ink.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2010/05/25/US-finds-lax-oil-rig-inspection/UPI-35621274839456/

- Since 2005, this particular rig had at least 16 fewer inspections than required by policy.
- The "rig was allowed to operate without safety documentation required by MMS regulations for the exact disaster scenario that occurred"
- The "the cutoff valve which failed has repeatedly broken down at other wells"
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=10661614

If failures of blowout preventers is rare and the policies were considered overkill, I could understand a somewhat relaxed approach to inspections (although not to the extent cited above). But that is not the case.

"there were 117 failures of blowout preventers during a two-year period in the late 1990s on the outer continental shelf of the United States"
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/30/93250/us-report-found-failure-of-offshore.html

Then there is the issue with the fire booms - a 1994 reponse plan calls for the use of fire booms to help control the spill; but did they have any? No.
http://blog.al.com/live/2010/05/fire_boom_oil_spill_raines.html

 

[Travis]

A lack of preparation for oil rig explosions is still inexcusable. Not as predictable, but still inexcusable. I mean, no one knows when an accident will happen, or they'll get sick, or their house will burn down, but they still have plans in place.

I can get behind that....if we have a clearly delineated idea of who has responsibly where.

 

[AlBell]

Obama taking more critique here than BP, strange.

Obama's problem is the it-seems-to-some lack of maximum effort in spill cleanup and mitigation activities.

IMO, as this drags on, as it will, for months more it will become more analogous to Carter and the Iran hostage crisis.

 

[MattusMaximus]

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

Deserved or not, the answer to this question is obviously "yes."

However, the big difference between this situation and Bush & Katrina is that here there is someone else even more deserving of blame: BP, Halliburton, and Transocean - the companies directly responsible for this fiasco.

Any damage done to Obama will be collateral because of this fact, which is why he's doing much better in the polls now than Bush was after Katrina.

And he still has the chance to turn any PR damage around by "keeping his boot on the neck" of those companies and making damn sure they foot the bill for a long time to clean up this mess. In addition, he and his administration will have to make an unprecedented effort to provide federal assistance to the Gulf Coast region for many years to come. Not only that, but Obama's administration had better damn well be getting ready as best it can for the nightmarish combination of hurricane season in the Gulf with this oil spill.

I can only hope, naively probably, that we could transcend politics in an effort to help the poor bastards getting hit by this mess. The Congress is going to have to get its act together for anything truly substantial & long-lasting to be put in place.

But I'm not going to hold my breath - it is, after all, an election year

 

[MattusMaximus]

I would like to see existing policies and regulations actually followed. Here are some things the government (I never mentioned Obama) did to drop the ball.

Excellent point. It's worth noting that when polled on who is to blame for not fixing this mess, Obama comes out on top when compared to both the federal government and BP.

The real long-lasting damage here is going to be to those who have been screaming for "more deregulation of business" over the years, as well as their political allies. Their agenda is now effectively trashed, and they know it.

 

[thaiboxerken]

Here it is. The Republicans tried to convince us that Bush's response to Katrina wasn't really that bad...until now. Now they want to say that Bush's response to Katrina was horrible, so that they can try to equate this oil spill predicament to it.

Hmmmmm...

I don't see this as being anything close. While I do see the administration having some fault, for not tightening up regulations in the MMS. I don't believe Obama's administration bears the majority of blame for it. It wasn't very big on the list of his priorities, as he and no one else.. especially, the republicans, thought there was much of a problem. The deregulation of the energy industry took place long before Obama took office.

In fact, there is a case to blame this on the last administration:

http://observers.france24.com/en/co...d-safety-precautions-circumvented-gulf-mexico

 

[MattusMaximus]

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.

You nailed it. It's interesting to see that many people seem to have this idea that our president & government is somehow all-powerful... a notion which is often encouraged by our government, btw. Now, when the stark reality hits that this is not true, some people can't seem to handle it.

I have a friend who is going nuts about this spill right now, and he often says, "why don't they just plug the hole?" As if it's that easy. I feel like telling him to face a fire-hose which is turned on all the way, and instructing him to "plug the hole" with his finger.

Btw, the irony here is he's also one of those rightwing people who, rather hypocritically, screams about how the government shouldn't have too much power. Yet here he is screaming louder than just about anyone I know for the feds & Obama to fix this mess

 

[thaiboxerken]

If the government had some magic pill to fix this, it would probably cost much $$$. If Obama used that expensive pill to fix this spill, the Republicans would complain about Obama's big-government spending.

 

[joobz]

Let me see if I get this straight:

A largely unregulated oil rig controlled by private interests causes an ecological disaster of epic proportions. A disaster created by an industry that has been demanding an opening up of drilling restrictions so that more private money can be earned.

Simultaneously, the responsible company, who has made record profits over the past 2-3 years thanks to high price of oil, had substandard contingency plans in place, making a cleanup response impossible.

Now, free market people are holding the government at fault for the mess because....what? Because they haven't stepped in and made it all better already? That they haven't fixed the mess the private sector created, at the cost of the american people?

I thought the free market was supposed to fix all. Isn't this exactly the kind of thing that is supposed to be handled best by the private sector? I thought that when government gets involved, things go bad?

Why, on this still green earth, are free market people so intent on asking for government intervention? Talk about corporate entitlement. We have already bailed out the auto industry, the banking industry, and now tax money is expected to be used to clean up the mess of the oil industry? Why?

If the government did fix it, would conservatives agree with increased regulations in the oil industry? With increased taxing and closing of corporate tax loop holes as a means of paying for the cost of cleanup? Or, are we expected to clean this up and say, thank you sir BP, may I have another?

Tell you the truth, the OP tells it all. It has nothing to do with the oil spill. It has all to do with making Obama look bad. As if the failure to clean up an oil spill is his fault. BP has failed completely and totally. The failed to have any effective level of redundant protections in place. This is BP's error. Not Obama's.

 

[angrysoba]

Let me see if I get this straight:

A largely unregulated oil rig controlled by private interests causes an ecological disaster of epic proportions. A disaster created by an industry that has been demanding an opening up of drilling restrictions so that more private money can be earned.

Simultaneously, the responsible company, who has made record profits over the past 2-3 years thanks to high price of oil, had substandard contingency plans in place, making a cleanup response impossible.

Now, free market people are holding the government at fault for the mess because....what? Because they haven't stepped in and made it all better already? That they haven't fixed the mess the private sector created, at the cost of the american people?

I thought the free market was supposed to fix all. Isn't this exactly the kind of thing that is supposed to be handled best by the private sector? I thought that when government gets involved, things go bad?

Why, on this still green earth, are free market people so intent on asking for government intervention? Talk about corporate entitlement. We have already bailed out the auto industry, the banking industry, and now tax money is expected to be used to clean up the mess of the oil industry? Why?

If the government did fix it, would conservatives agree with increased regulations in the oil industry? With increased taxing and closing of corporate tax loop holes as a means of paying for the cost of cleanup? Or, are we expected to clean this up and say, thank you sir BP, may I have another?

Tell you the truth, the OP tells it all. It has nothing to do with the oil spill. It has all to do with making Obama look bad. As if the failure to clean up an oil spill is his fault. BP has failed completely and totally. The failed to have any effective level of redundant protections in place. This is BP's error. Not Obama's.

Yes, this is true.

You can't complain one minute about government interference and regulations being too strict for private enterprise and then say the government had better start taking more responsibility for lack of safeguards etc...

 

[JihadJane]

Obama's Katrina!

America's Chernobyl?