Will Obama's demand for $20 billion BP escrow backfire? Updated.

Wednesday's announcement that BP had agreed to President Obama's demand for creation of a $20 billion escrow to compensate victims of the Deepwater Horizon infuriated some GOP members of Congress and raised concerns of at least one Gulf state governor.  Not surprisingly, The Huffington Post attributes the negative response to a perceived vulnerability for political gain:

Republicans on the Hill have calculated that President Obama's successful demand that BP set up a $20 billion escrow account to pay out claims is ripe for political attack. In the wake of Wednesday's White House announcement, a host of GOP officials are raising questions about both the process by which the deal was made and the deal itself -- going so far as to apologize to BP on America's behalf.

"I'm ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday," said Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) during a hearing on Thursday morning with BP's CEO Tony Hayward." I think it is a tragedy in the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown -- in this case a $20 billion shakedown -- with the attorney general of the United States, who is legitimately conducting a criminal investigation and has every right to do so to protect the American people, participating in what amounts to a $20 billion slush fund that's unprecedented in our nation's history, which has no legal standing, which I think sets a terrible precedent for our nation's future."

"I'm only speaking for myself. I'm not speaking for anyone else, but I apologize," Barton added. "I do not want to live in a county where anytime a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, [it is] subject to some sort of political pressure that, again, in my words, amounts to a shakedown."

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said of the escrow announcement, "We think it will help ensure that BP is taking ownership."  But Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour expressed reservations and concern that the move may backfire.  From Fox News:

Mississippi's governor said Wednesday he's not sure the federal government should have made BP put $20 billion into escrow to compensate victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill because the company needs it to drill more wells and make money so it can pay up.

President Barack Obama insisted BP set the money aside, and the company agreed to put $5 billion a year into the fund for the next four years.

"If they take a huge amount of money and put it in an escrow account so they can't use it to drill oil wells and produce revenue, are they going to be able to pay us?" Gov. Haley Barbour told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Wednesday.

Millions of gallons of oil have gushed into the Gulf since a BP well ruptured eight weeks ago off the Louisiana coast.

"We need them to generate revenue to be able to pay us," said Barbour, a Republican. "I worry that this escrow account reduces the chance of that rather than increasing the chances of that."

I think both criticisms have merit, but Barbour suggests that the escrow burden has the very real potential of reducing BP's ability to pay damage claims for this historic disaster.  A quick look at the company balance sheet seems to bear that out.  Democrats like to rail about the obscene profits of the oil industry, and, in fact, BP did earn a $16.7 billion profit in 2009.  But anyone with a modicum of knowledge about business, knows that companies prosper and fail on cash flow. In 2009, BP's year-end working capital was just over $8 billion.  In 2008 it was a negative $3.4 billion.  Removing $5 billion a year for four years from BP's current assets will seriously impede its ability to operate and grow its core business activities.  The Obama drilling moratorium certainly will not help. If BP declares bankruptcy, who will pay for the cleanup?  We all know the answer to that question.  The taxpayer.

Aesop's fable about the goose that laid the golden eggs taught us, "Much wants more and loses all."

Update:  Rep. Barton apologizes for his apology.

Musings from the bridge

It is my habit to walk the Biloxi Bay Bridge from Ocean Springs to Biloxi and back when I visit my parents on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  Since the heat index was expected to rise over 100 today, I set out early in the morning for my walk.  The bridge was teeming with walkers, young and old.  On the pier of the Ocean Springs Yacht Club at the base of the bridge, I was pleased to see a sandhill crane.  For a moment, I could almost forget that an ominous black cloud of crude was bearing down on the Magnolia State from her southern aqueous border.  That mental respite would not last. (Photo by Chief Petty Officer William McAnally, USCG)

As I reached the highest point on the bridge I saw two large commercial shrimp boats emerge from underneath the span heading out toward the Gulf.  I really didn't think much about it,  Then I saw another.  And another.  They just kept coming.  On the return leg of my walk, there were shrimp boats lined up all the way to the horizon, with others joining from the Ocean Springs harbor to the east and the Biloxi Small Craft Harbor to the west.  It was quite surreal.  In my forty-plus years of living in and visiting the area, I had never seen so many boats in Biloxi Bay.  It was reminiscent of the annual Blessing of the Fleet, but without the colorful flags and pageantry.  This looked more like a naval flotilla heading to war.

These shrimp boats and their crews were likely heading out to the Mississippi Sound as part of BP's Vessels of Opportunity program.  From the San Angelo (TX) Standard-Times

To date, more than 2,300 vessels have been hired as part of the Vessels of Opportunity program, and are working aggressively in multiple shifts across the Gulf to perform a variety of important tasks, including deploying and monitoring containment boom, transporting equipment and personnel and surface and subsurface surveillance (looking for oil).

The VOO program hires vessels of all sizes—with a priority placed on commercial vessels that make their living on the sea—to perform critical response tasks to mitigate the oil’s impact on our vital shorelines. Compensation depends on the size of the vessel and ranges from $1,200-$3,000 per day. Crew members are paid $200 per eight-hour shift.

Gov. Bobby Jindal orders National Guard to build barrier wall offshore

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has ordered the National Guard to start building sand barriers nine miles offshore to protect the state from the millions of gallons of crude that threaten his state's way of life.  ABC News reports:

Eight weeks into the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of the Mexico, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has told the National Guard that there's no time left to wait for BP, so they're taking matters into their own hands.

In Fort Jackson, La., Jindal has ordered the Guard to start building barrier walls right in the middle of the ocean. The barriers, built nine miles off shore, are intended to keep the oil from reaching the coast by filling the gaps between barrier islands.

Jindal's plan to construct physical barriers to the oil has been criticized by environmentalists, BP and the Army Corps of Engineers as an unproven oil-response technique.  Some question the effects the berms with have on natural tidal flows, citing the possibility that saltwater could be channeled in new directions threatening the marsh grasses.  A critical article in Scientific American seems to vaguely suggest that the marsh grasses may tolerate the oil more easily than the salty water of the ocean.

Rob Young, a coastal geologist at Western Carolina University recently expressed his doubts about the barrier walls to NPR:

"The structure that I see that they're planning to build is going to erode as soon as it's constructed, and it's going to have a tough time making it through a hurricane season that's predicted to be a fairly active one," Young tells NPR's Melissa Block. "I just don't have a very high level of confidence that a project that's going to require a lot of energy and a lot of sand and mobilize a lot of people is going to do what they promise it will do."

To borrow a hackneyed phrase from the Obama administration, Bobby Jindal has been at ground zero in this disaster "from day one," and has been begging BP and the federal government for more help in preventing the oil from reaching the fragile Louisiana coast.  Jindal is no intellectual slouch.  From the governor's website:

Jindal was born in Baton Rouge on June 10, 1971. He graduated from Baton Rouge High School in 1988 and went on to attend Brown University where he graduated with honors in biology and public policy. Following his graduation from Brown he attended Oxford University in England as a Rhodes Scholar, having turned down admissions to medical and law schools at both Harvard and Yale.

As Jindal takes matters into his own hands, he reveals a refreshing and fearless leadership that our country has been sorely lacking.  Teddy Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" speech comes to mind:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

As oil flows into the Gulf, Obama redoubles efforts......on healthcare

President Obama has not met or spoken with Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, since the Deepwater Horizon oil platform exploded in the Gulf nearly two months ago. (Although CBS News is reporting that he might...just might meet with Heyward on June 17.)  He has had time for other things like:

•Two days of media events (White House Correspondents Dinner and a tête a tête with Bono)
•Three days of fundraising
•Four commemorations
•Six days of vacation
•Six days of campaigning
•Six sports events
•Seven days of golf

He and his staff have also given several interviews defending the federal government's response to the oil disaster (from day one!), talking about keeping the boot on the throat of BP and finding out whose a** to kick.  Polls haven't been kind to the President.  So what does he do in response?  Release an ad on cable television basically daring the GOP to repeal healthcare.  From Talking Points Memo:

Democrats on Thursday will launch a new 60-second ad on national cable television accusing repeal-happy Republicans of wanting to get rid of health care reform and all its benefits. The ad, obtained by TPMDC, is timed to coincide with the government mailing to seniors the first $250 Medicare rebate checks fixing the so-called prescription drug "donut hole."

The ad is titled "We Can't Afford To Go Back." It outlines the positive parts of the health care law signed by President Obama this spring and charges, "Republicans want to take it all away."

I've learned that DNC Chairman Tim Kaine on Thursday will dare Republicans to make repeal the focus of their fall campaign to try and win back control of Congress, challenging the GOP to tell senior citizens and others benefiting from health care exactly which parts of the reform law they'd scrap.

I'm sure Gulf Coast residents will forget their troubles and come on, get happy when they see this:

Landrieu and drilling experts blast Salazar

The Independent Weekly has obtained a letter drafted by a panel of experts the Obama administration consulted before declaring a six-month moratorium on offshore drilling, claiming that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar misrepresented their positions:

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has some explaining to do. The panel of experts the Obama administration turned to for advice on how to address offshore drilling safety in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and ongoing gush of oil into the Gulf of Mexico are speaking out, saying they never agreed to the six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling and that Salazar misrepresented their position. The INDsider has obtained a copy of the letter penned by those experts, along with a fax they sent to Gov. Bobby Jindal and U.S. Sens. Mary Landrieu and David Vitter.

In no uncertain terms, the experts claim Salazar falsely implied that they supported the six-month drilling moratorium. However, in his May 27 report to President Barack Obama, the interior secretary said a panel of seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering “peer reviewed” his recommendations, among which is a six-month moratorium on all drilling in water depths of more than 500 feet. That ban went into effect a few days later, shutting down more than 30 rigs.

In their letter, the angry panelists clarify that what they reviewed was an earlier version of the secretary’s report that suggested a six-month moratorium only on new drilling — and only in waters deeper than 1,000 feet.

“We broadly agree with the detailed recommendations in the report and compliment the Department of Interior for its efforts. However, we do not agree with the six month blanket moratorium on floating drilling,” they write. “A moratorium was added after the final review and was never agreed to by the contributors.” The panel members say the blanket moratorium will not measurably reduce risk and will have a lasting impact on the nation’s economy, which may greater than that of the oil spill. They say Salazar’s report highlights the safety record of the industry in drilling more than 50,000 wells on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf, more than 2,000 of which were in water over 1,000 feet and 700 in depths greater than 5,000 feet. Noting that the safety of offshore workers is much better than that of the average worker in the U.S., they write, “We have been using subsea blowout preventers since the mid-1960s. The only other major pollution event from offshore drilling was 41 years ago. This was from a shallow water platform in Santa Barbara Channel drilled with a BOP on the surface of the platform.”

Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu used the revelation to blast Salazar.  From The Daily Caller:

Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, a key Democrat on the Senate energy committee, blasted Obama’s top offshore drilling official for the administration’s ongoing ban of deepwater drilling in the Gulf Coast, charging the decision could cost her home state more than 300,000 jobs.

Landrieu said a majority of experts consulted by Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar in deciding to impose the moratorium have come forward to her to express their disagreement with his decision.

In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill – with oil still gushing from more than a mile beneath the ocean’s surface – Salazar conducted a 30-day review of the safety and environmental precautions for offshore drilling rigs.

That review formed the basis for the decision to halt basis and was reviewed by 15 experts that are listed in the report.

Now Landrieu claims eight of those experts – a majority – disagree with Salazar’s decision based on their advice.

The revelation could undercut the credibility of Salazar’s decision to halt drilling in the Gulf that has been criticized by Republicans and industry officials as a knee-jerk, politically motivated reaction.

Salazar's response to Landrieu's concerns:  Don't worry.  We'll make BP pay for those 300,000 lost jobs:

Notably, Salazar, pressed by Landrieu on the issue, said BP is financially responsible for paying the salaries of workers whose jobs are going to be lost because of the administration’s decision to ban drilling.

“If this long list of companies that are not oil companies, but oil service companies, have to either go out of business or take bankruptcy or layoff thousands of workers are you going to ask BP to pick up their salaries and to make them whole?” Landrieu asked.

“The answer to that is yes,” Salazar said, “BP is responsible for all the damages that flow from the BP oil spill and these are some of the consequences from that oil spill.”

It’s unclear whether BP faces any legal responsibility to pay the salaries of workers laid off directly because of a regulatory decision by the federal government. BP did not immediately return a request for comment.

I wonder if Salazar has a panel of 15 legal experts that will back him up on that?

More from The Times-Picayune here.  Laura Curtis at HotAir's Green Room raises the question, is the moratorium even legal?

Saints will raffle off team superbowl ring to help victims of oil spill

New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees announced on Fox News this morning that the Saints will raffle off an authentic superbowl ring to raise money for victims of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.  WWLTV has more:

For four months now, fans of the Saints have wondered what the team’s Super Bowl rings look like.

Now they’ll get a chance to own one themselves.

The team announced Tuesday during a visit to areas affected by the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico that it will hold a raffle for a chance to win one of the rings. Proceeds will go to help coastal renewal and the areas hard hit by the continuous onslaught of the sludge.

Ever since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, the Saints have taken on a leadership role in community activism, holding charity events one after another to help victims of various calamities in the region.

Now they’re stepping up again.

The Saints originally were supposed to visit Governor Bobby Jindal at the Governor’s mansion on Tuesday for a luncheon to honor their Super Bowl 44 win.

But this weekend, the team decided instead to help pick up the spirits of those most affected by the gusher in the Gulf.

The team toured Fort Jackson, where animals covered in the weathered crude are being cleaned and nursed back to health. They also held a brief ceremony where team owner Tom Benson, his granddaughter Rita Benson-LeBlanc, Head Coach Sean Payton, quarterback Drew Brees and running back Reggie Bush spoke.

It was Brees, however, who delivered the news.

Over the next few months, the team will raffle off one of the rings. Tickets are $2 with a minimum ticket order being $10, Brees said. The winner will be announced prior to the team’s Sept. 9 home opener against Minnesota.

The website to purchase tickets will be www.saintsgulfcoastrenewal.org, according to Brees.

Brees told Fox News the web site should be up and running sometime Tuesday afternoon.

Computer models suggest oil may zoom up east coast

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about supercomputer models of the Gulf oil slick, which suggest that it may enter the Gulf Stream and zoom up the Atlantic coast:

New supercomputer studies suggest it is "very likely" ocean currents will carry oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico around the tip of Florida and thousands of miles up the U.S. East Coast this summer, researchers announced Thursday.


"It is truly a simulation, not a prediction," said Terry Wallace, principal associate director for science, technology and engineering at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which collaborated on the project. "But it shows that when you inject something into the Gulf, it is likely to have much larger consequences."

So far the oil has been confined by strong eddies, but that is almost certainly a temporary respite, say oceanographers.

Researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and the Los Alamos laboratory used a $100 million computer model of the world's ocean-circulation patterns to assess how currents could sweep the oil out of the Gulf.

The simulations show a strong Loop Current almost inevitably will pull the oil into the powerful Gulf Stream. It would then travel up the Atlantic coast at a speed of about 100 miles a day.

From these simulations we can say with a high degree of certainty that it is very likely sometime in the next six months that oil from this spill will get into the Atlantic," said oceanographer Synte Peacock of the NCAR, who is running the project. "We can say that when it happens, it will be fast, much faster than anything we have seen so far," she said.

The Journal's Lee Hotz has more at the News Hub:

White House: We're on the case! Jindal: Help!

Today's press conference in Galiano, Louisiana with Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, Governor Bobby Jindal and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is a case study in contrasts.  Napolitano talked about the enormity of the federal government's response to what will likely become the worst oil spill in our nation's history.  Spin.  Salazar spoke glowingly of the President's response "from day one", gave shout outs to members of the Senate who had made the trip down from DC, and reiterated his "boot on the throat of BP" shtick.  More spin. Governor Jindal wasn't having any of it.  He decried the response of BP and the federal government as inadequate and expressed his frustration that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) had not responded to his emergency request to execute a $350 million sand dredging plan designed to create a barrier to protect Louisiana's coastal areas from the oil.

Jindal argued his position in earlier press conference on Sunday.  From Reuters:

"Silence on this plan is the equivalent of saying: 'we will just clean it (oil) out of the wetlands,'" he said, arguing that the dangers of inaction were far greater than possible risks of associated with construction.

"BP is responsible for paying for this but they should not have veto authority over the dredging plan or any of the other plans that are being proposed by the parish or by the state," he said.

State and local leaders want to dredge sand from the sea floor and erect up to 80 miles of levees, which reinforce, extend and in some cases join barrier islands to impede the progress of oil into the marshlands.

Experts on the coast including conservationists and academics have deep doubts about the plan, arguing it would take too long to implement and could alter the Mississippi River delta's balance between fresh and salt water (emphasis added).

Conservationists and academics (two of our President's core constituencies) certainly have a right to their opinions about Jindal's plan; but unlike the hardworking people of the Louisiana Gulf Coast, they are not deeply invested in its outcome because they don't actually produce anything.  And what possible difference will "the balance between fresh and salt water" have if all of it is so contaminated by oil that it will support neither fresh nor saltwater life forms for the forseeable future?

Some video of today's press conference.  Napolitano and Jindal in the first part.  Salazar and Senator Dick Durbin in part 2.
 

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal won't wait for federal action

As President Obama's Interior chief lashes out at BP, yet another state has decided not to wait on the federal government to do its job.  Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has decided to move ahead with plans to create sand barriers to protect his state's fragile coastline from the expansive oil slick that is breaching its borders:

With oil pushing at least 12 miles into Louisiana’s marshes and two major pelican rookeries now coated in crude, Gov. Bobby Jindal says the state is working on chain of sand berms that would skirt the state’s coastline.
Jindal visited one of the affected nesting grounds Sunday. Jindal and officials from several coastal parishes say the berms would close the door on the oil still pouring from a deepwater gusher about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast.

The berms would be made with sandbags. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also is considering a broader plan that would use dredging to build sand berms across more of the barrier islands.

Plans to build coastal protective barriers from dredged sand are stalled, awaiting an environmental impact study and approval by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Representatives of that agency say it will take several more days to render its decision.  State and local leaders in the Gulf coastal states are not prepared to wait that long.  They know that the economic survival of these coastal communities has reached a tipping point.

Please pray for Governors Bobby Jindal, Haley Barbour, Bob Riley and Charlie Crist as they endeavor to protect their citizens and the natural resources of their beautiful states from this horrific disaster.

Deepwater Horizon blowout: 60 Minutes

On CBS "60 Minutes" last night, an exclusive interview with Deepwater Horizon survivor Mike Williams revealed three possible causes of the catastrophic oil rig explosion on April 20th:

First:

Down near the seabed is the blowout preventer, or BOP. It's used to seal the well shut in order to test the pressure and integrity of the well, and, in case of a blowout, it's the crew's only hope. A key component is a rubber gasket at the top called an "annular," which can close tightly around the drill pipe.

Williams says, during a test, they closed the gasket. But while it was shut tight, a crewman on deck accidentally nudged a joystick, applying hundreds of thousands of pounds of force, and moving 15 feet of drill pipe through the closed blowout preventer. Later, a man monitoring drilling fluid rising to the top made a troubling find.

"He discovered chunks of rubber in the drilling fluid. He thought it was important enough to gather this double handful of chunks of rubber and bring them into the driller shack. I recall asking the supervisor if this was out of the ordinary. And he says, 'Oh, it's no big deal.' And I thought, 'How can it be not a big deal? There's chunks of our seal is now missing,'" Williams told Pelley. [snip)

Second:

The BOP is operated from the surface by wires connected to two control pods; one is a back-up. Williams says one pod lost some of its function weeks before.

Transocean tells us the BOP was tested by remote control after these incidents and passed. But nearly a mile below, there was no way to know how much damage there was or whether the pod was unreliable.

 Third:

In finishing the well, the plan was to have a subcontractor, Halliburton, place three concrete plugs, like corks, in the column. The Transocean manager wanted to do this with the column full of heavy drilling fluid - what drillers call "mud" - to keep the pressure down below contained. But the BP manager wanted to begin to remove the "mud" before the last plug was set. That would reduce the pressure controlling the well before the plugs were finished.

Asked why BP would do that, Bea (Dr. Bob Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley) told Pelley, "It expedites the subsequent steps."

"It's a matter of going faster," Pelley remarked.

"Faster, sure," Bea replied.

Bea said BP had won that argument.

"If the 'mud' had been left in the column, would there have been a blowout?" Pelley asked.

"It doesn't look like it," Bea replied.

Stay tuned.

AP deepwater whitewash

The Associated Press has been working overtime to protect the legacy of President Obama in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster.  John Hinderaker at Powerline surgically dissects and discredits a glowing AP report entitled "Obama oil response: aggressive as crisis unfolded."  First, he notes that all the sourcing for the article comes from the administration itself.  Second, he astutely recognizes that the article doesn't cite a single "aggressive" action taken by the administration that did anything to effectively combat the spill.  He then concludes with this:

Actually, if you pay attention to the dates, the AP documents, as many others have, the slow pace of the administration's response to the spill. The Deepwater Horizon blew up on April 20, yet it wasn't until April 28 that Barack Obama told his advisers that he wanted meaningful action taken to counteract the spill. By what standard, one wonders, is this an "aggressive" response?

Moreover, the AP is either ignorant of, or prefers not to mention, the key facts that we and others have publicized about this incident. As we have pointed out, responsible federal officials believed by April 21--the day after the oil rig exploded--that a major oil leak, on the order of 10,000 to 20,000 barrels per day, was likely if not inevitable. This is completely at odds with the AP's comforting assurance that in the early days after the explosion, any resulting oil spill was believed to be minimal.

Further, the AP never mentions the most obvious failing of the federal response to the disaster--the fact that, despite a 1994 plan that said major oil spills in the Gulf would be fought with fire booms, when the Deepwater Horizon blew up the federal government did not have a single fire boom on hand. This is malfeasance of an extraordinary nature, and if a Republican administration were in the White House, every American would know about it by now. Yet the Associated Press and its fellows in the liberal media have successfully kept the lid on what should be a scandal of major proportions. This time it is the AP that says: Barry, you're doing a heck of a job!

AP:  Adulation of the President; Always Posturing; Actively Pernicious; Against the People.

Obama scolds Wall St, Arizona; appeals to African Americans and Latinos while a million gallons of crude heads for the Gulf Coast

The April 20th explosion of British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform precipitated a breached wellhead and a catastrophic hemorrhage of 5000 barrels of crude oil per day, and what will likely be the worst environmental disaster in American history.  It took the White House eight days to respond.

Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner presents a damning timeline:

It's been more than a week since British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform 53 miles southwest of the Louisiana coast in the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico exploded and sank on April 20, leaving a breached wellhead bleeding an estimated 5,000 barrels of oil petroleum per day.

Eleven workers on the rig were killed in the explosion and subsequent fire. The gigantic oil slick created by the disaster has reached the coast line and threatens to become the nation's worst environmental disaster ever. More than a week passed before President Obama moved to address the disaster despite the clear evidence that BP and the Coast Guard were unable to stop the flow of oil and contain the spill.

Obama's delay in acting to put needed resources on the disaster site is being compared to President George W. Bush's tawdry response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005. One big difference in the perception of the Bush and Obama responses to disasters in Lousiana, however, is the way the media has reported their respective delays.

For Bush, the cries of uncaring apathy began within hours of the commencement of the crisis. For Obama, very little has been said about his apparent unconcern until the last 48 hours. But by now it's become so obvious that even the New York Times had to take notice.

The New York Times did, indeed, take notice, but its response is predictably tame.  You can read it here.

Doug Ross has put together a revealing pictorial timeline of this disaster and reminds us what the President was doing for eight days while over a million gallons of crude oil headed for the shores of our Gulf Coast.  His conclusion:

Perhaps if the oil breached the Louisiana levees, then caught on fire, and then then [sic] turned New Orleans into a Dresden-like inferno, the President would stop campaigning for a couple of days and actually pay attention to his own, personal Katrina. Even The New York Times has noticed, decrying the President's lackadaisical response. But I'm guessing that somehow, someway, it's all President Bush's fault.