Day: May 27, 2010

Blue Sky

unsolicitedanalysis:

Did Reagan give the incompetent, corrupt motherfuckers in the Interior the gifts, lunches, or sport tickets?  His ghost must have turned their computers to porn.  And he personally instructed them to allow the drilling companies to fill out their inspection reports themselves.

[…]

What you’re doing instead is trying to pin the blame on a minority party for dubiously-documented “systematic weakening” based on a nebulous “anti-government right” with no cited paper trail of cause-inducing failure.

What color is the sky in your world? Two seconds worth of cursory googling:

And, in this instance, Cheney directly contributed to, and arguably caused this accident by determining that acoustic switches for blowout preventers would be an undue burden on the industry:

In secret meetings with the oil company officials in 2001, incoming Vice President Cheney set the foundation for a permissive, welcome mat with the oil industry.

After stocking the Federal government’s Material Management Service with his cronies, this agency reversed an earlier 2000 decision requiring a mandatory accusatorial regulator, allowing BP and others not to install a $500,000 acoustic switch to automatically shut down oil gushers.

Reversed the decision that would have prevented this accident. But, yeah, the take-home lesson here is that sensible regulatory agencies just won’t work. Ever. Nothing whatsoever can be done about it. The market will do all the regulating anyone could ever want. Best thing to do is pretend that no empirical data on the capability of regulation to sensibly manage industry exists and that nothing useful could be drawn from such information anyway. Keep walking. Some things in life are meant to be mysterious.

On the national level, bipartisanship usually means Democrats ignore the needs of the poor and abandon the idea that government can play a role in issues of poverty, race discrimination, sex discrimination or environmental protection

Barack Obama… in 1996

Precious Blame

unsolicitedanalysis:

Where was this clarity during the Bush administration? The failure of federal, state, and local regulators/agencies never absolved our previous President.

It was certainly absent if you’re looking for the MSM to provide it. But you’re missing the fact that Bush specifically was in favor of the failure of our federal, state, and local government and regulatory agencies. Need I quote Lord Reagan? I guess I do:

government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem

You can’t deny the government a legitimate role in any issue, no matter how large or small, and then expect government to be secretly housing a massive underwater engineering specialty, or to have regulated the offshore drilling industry into essential safety. This is the fundamental disconnect of the current argument, not that that stops the spread of utter nonsense.
Every prior GOP administration has systematically weakened regulations on offshore drilling. These chickens come home to roost and it’s suddenly all Obama’s fault? How? Why? In what universe does that make any rational sense?

And, of course, the anti-government right’s reaction to the crisis? Blame the government. Obama should (apparently) be down there, personally, running the mud shot or at the very least torturing somebody aboard the mud shot injection machine.

Now, of course, were he down there, you get to play the “government meddling is ruining BP’s brilliant plan” card. That’s what I call good policy.