Tag Archives: Gulf

Videos

Who is better at handling wars and natural disasters? Bush or Obama?

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Here’s the poll from Louisiana voters described in the leftist LA Times.

Excerpt:

Former President George W. Bush showed more leadership in dealing with the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina than President Obama has shown in handling the oil calamity in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a poll of Louisianans released Friday.

Obama, who will make his 10th trip to the gulf when he travels to New Orleans on Sunday, will seek to reassure residents that he remains committed to rebuilding a region still feeling the effects from Katrina’s deadly landfall and flooding. Obama will also reassert his administration’s commitment to the cleanup from the BP oil well leak, the nation’s worst oil environmental disaster.

But a poll of Louisianans by Public Policy Polling shows those reassurances may have a hard time. Just 32% give Obama good marks for his actions in the aftermath of the spill, while 61% disapprove.

By contrast, those polled said that Bush’s leadership on Katrina was better than Obama’s on the spill. A majority,  54%, said that Bush did the better job of helping Louisiana through the hurricane crisis compared to the 33% who chose Obama, PPP said on Friday.

That 21-point spread was more than when PPP asked the same question in June and found Bush ahead by 15 points.

Louisiana is a purple state – half red and half blue. They’ve been trending red lately under the governance of the highly competent Bobby Jindal, but they still have a ton of Democrats in high positions.

Who was right about Iraq? Bush or Obama?

Here’s a video that shows who wanted the surge, and who opposed the surge. (H/T Hot Air)

The surge worked. We won. Our troops are coming home. The total cost for both wars (about 700 billion) was far less than the 3 trillion dollars in deficits that Obama has run up since he was elected. And remember, Obama spent that money on studying Chinese prostitutes and on building tunnels for turtles, and similar projects to reward the people who voted for him. That’s why unemployment is still so high.

My previous post showing (with videos) who was responsible for the housing bubble recession, and who tried to stop the recession.

Who’s really extreme?

I found this video at Peter Sean Bradley’s blog.

Remember in November!

UPDATE: Gallup poll finds that more Iraqis approved of US leadership under Bush than under Obama.

UPDATE: More fatalities in Afghanistan under two years of Obama than under eight years of Bush.

Commentary

Bobby Jindal explains how Obama’s drilling moratorium will cost jobs

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Bobby and Supriya Jindal

Story here in the Washington Post. (H/T Ace of Spades)

Excerpt:

Against this backdrop, the federal government unwisely chose to add insult to injury by decreeing a moratorium on deepwater drilling in the gulf. This ill-advised and ill-considered moratorium, which a federal judge called “arbitrary” and “capricious,” creates a second disaster for our economy, throwing thousands of hardworking folks out of their jobs and causing real damage to many families. Now this federal policy risks killing 20,000 more jobs and will result in a loss of $65 million to $135 million in wages each month.

To ensure that such a disaster does not happen again, should the federal government increase oversight, or require additional and better equipment or on-site federal inspectors, or even temporarily pause drilling at specific rigs for additional reviews? Of course. Could it? Of course. But by simply stopping all deepwater drilling, federal officials appear more interested in ideology and scoring political points — as they have done with the misguided cap-and-trade legislation — at the expense of Americans who derive their livelihood from the energy industry.

Let’s be clear: This moratorium will do nothing to clean up the Gulf of Mexico, and it is already doing great harm to many hardworking citizens. The effects will extend well beyond Louisiana. Since the moratorium was announced, America has already lost two rigs to foreign countries. More drilling companies are negotiating right now to work elsewhere. Every time we decrease our level of production, we make America more dependent on foreign sources of energy.

On those few occasions when our country suffers a commercial airline tragedy, we do not respond by stopping all air travel for six months. Rather, we get to work figuring out the root cause and set about trying to make air travel safer. We don’t grind everything to a halt and put tens of thousands of people out of work, jeopardizing our economy.

And these jobs are typically male jobs, so you really undermining the man’s role as protector and provider in the family when you go after jobs typically done by men. And I’m sure that some of the foreign countries we buy oil from are not sympathetic with American national security and foreign policy.

What about Paul Ryan?

But Jindal’s not the only one making sense in the news. (H/T Hot Air)

I hope that Bobby Jindal and Paul Ryan run for President in 2012. Ryan is passionate and informed about the budget, and Jindal is passionate and informed about business and job creation. Let’s elect some grown-ups, and get back to the 4.5% unemployment rate that we had under George W. Bush.

News

How environmental regulations hinder clean-up of oil spill

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My Pet Scape-Goat
My Pet Scape-Goat

From the Financial Post. (H/T Ace of Spades via ECM)

Excerpt:

Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn’t good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million — if water isn’t at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.

When ships in U.S. waters take in oil-contaminated water, they are forced to store it. As U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the official in charge of the clean-up operation, explained in a press briefing on June 11, “We have skimmed, to date, about 18 million gallons of oily water–the oil has to be decanted from that [and] our yield is usually somewhere around 10% or 15% on that.” In other words, U.S. ships have mostly been removing water from the Gulf, requiring them to make up to 10 times as many trips to storage facilities where they off-load their oil-water mixture, an approach Koops calls “crazy.”

Here’s a recent update from Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit.

Excerpt:

** The feds only accepted assistance from 5 of 28 countries a month after the disaster.
** It took the Obama Administration 53 days to accept help from the Dutch and British.
** It took them 58 days to mobilize the US military to the Gulf.
** The feds shut down crude-sucking barges due to fire extinguisher concerns.
** The Obama Administration ignored oil boom manufacturers that have miles of product stockpiled in their warehouses.
** They only have moved 31 of 2,000 oil skimmers to the disaster area off of Florida.
** Florida hired an additional 5 skimmer boats to operate off its coast due to federal inaction.
** There are no skimmer boats off the coast of Mississippi.
** The massive A-Boat skimmer won’t be allowed to join the cleanup effort until the Coast Guard and the EPA figure out whether it meets their standards.
** The feds shut down sand berm dredging off the Louisiana coast.
** The president continues to hit the golf course, ball games, hold BBQ’s and party while the crude oil washes up on shore.

I thought that Mr. “A-Unicorn-In-Every-Pot” was going to cool the Earth and make the oceans stop their rising or whatever… Beh! He can’t even fix this oil spill!