AP: Oil eating microbe feasts in Gulf; who will provide dessert?

WASHINGTON – A newly discovered type of oil-eating microbe is suddenly flourishing in the Gulf of Mexico.

Scientists discovered the new microbe while studying the underwater dispersion of millions of gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf following the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

And the microbe works without significantly depleting oxygen in the water, researchers led by Terry Hazen at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., reported Tuesday in the online journal Sciencexpress.

"Our findings, which provide the first data ever on microbial activity from a deepwater dispersed oil plume, suggest" a great potential for bacteria to help dispose of oil plumes in the deep-sea, Hazen said in a statement.

Environmentalists have raised concerns about the giant oil spill and the underwater plume of dispersed oil, particularly its potential effects on sea life. A report just last week described a 22-mile long underwater mist of tiny oil droplets.

"Our findings show that the influx of oil profoundly altered the microbial community by significantly stimulating deep-sea" cold temperature bacteria that are closely related to known petroleum-degrading microbes, Hazen reported.

Their findings are based on more than 200 samples collected from 17 deepwater sites between May 25 and June 2. They found that the dominant microbe in the oil plume is a new species, closely related to members of Oceanospirillales.

Isn’t it amazing the things we don’t know? Especially, when you think about how many so-called ‘environmental scientists’ there are now collecting paychecks.

This microbe thrives in cold water, with temperatures in the deep recorded at 5 degrees Celsius (41 Fahrenheit).

Hazen suggested that the bacteria may have adapted over time due to periodic leaks and natural seeps of oil in the Gulf.

And of course the ‘oil leaks’ they are talking about would have had to be going on for millennia for such evolution to occur.

Scientists also had been concerned that oil-eating activity by microbes would consume large amounts of oxygen in the water, creating a "dead zone" dangerous to other life. But the new study found that oxygen saturation outside the oil plume was 67-percent while within the plume it was 59-percent.

The research was supported by an existing grant with the Energy Biosciences Institute, a partnership led by the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois that is funded by a $500 million, 10-year grant from BP. Other support came from the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Oklahoma Research Foundation.

Oh, this research was funded by BP. So obviously they just made up this microbe out of whole cloth.

What a relief. We were worried for a minute that the BP spill might not have been the end of the world.

Harvard prof urges exploitation of oil spill to enact carbon tax

Top elitist and Harvard Professor Kenneth Rogoff has shamefully called for the BP oil spill disaster to be exploited in order to create political momentum behind a carbon tax, even going to the lengths of embracing the nightmare scenario of hurricanes pushing the oil onshore as a way to create political momentum behind Obama’s dreaded “green economy”.

In an opinion piece for the Korea Times, Rogoff sensationally warns that failure to exploit the tragedy for political ends would represent a “lost opportunity,” a startling display of mercenary indiscretion, and a shining example of what we warned about from the very beginning, that elitists would waste little time in pointing to heart-rendering images of oil-covered birds and dead wildlife as part of a crass stunt to push their consumption tax agenda.

Rogoff is a Bilderberg Group member, having attended the 2006 conference of global elitists in Germany. He is also a regular attendee of Trilateral Commission meetings. Rogoff is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and writes for the group’s publication Foreign Affairs. He is currently Professor of Economics at Harvard University, having previously served as an economist at the International Monetary Fund, and at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.

“The fact is, the BP oil spill is on the cusp of becoming a political game-changer of historic proportions. If summer hurricanes push huge quantities of oil onto Florida’s beaches and up the Eastern seaboard, the resulting political explosion will make the reaction to the financial crisis seem muted,” writes Rogoff, seemingly salivating about the potential of an even greater tragedy that would contribute to “rekindling interest in a carbon tax”.

Later in the article, Rogoff brazenly states that “exploiting tragedy” in the Gulf is just one way of filling the coffers of the federal government.

He goes on to laud the visual propaganda value of “high-definition images of oil spewing from the bottom of the ocean” in addition to a “blackened coastline and devastated wildlife” as a tool through which to mobilize young people into lobbying for a tax on the very substance they exhale.

Exploiting the catastrophe is necessary to “catalyze support for an American environmental policy with teeth,” writes Rogoff, noting that the cap and trade system basically amounts to the same thing as a carbon tax and is just a trick to hide the use of the incendiary word “tax”. Of course, that policy has little to do with the environment and everything to do with fattening the wallets of the people invested in the cap and trade scam, the same alarmists who push claptrap about global warming and CO2, Rogoff’s elitist buddies Al Gore, Maurice Strong and the rest of the globalists who own and run the cap and trade scheme.

Cap and trade was also founded and funded by big oil conglomerates – which is why transnational oil companies have been the most vehement peddlers of global warming propaganda.

Companies like British Petroleum and Exxon Mobil have been amongst the biggest promoters of man-made global warming because they are headed up by one-world globalists who understand that the carbon tax will do nothing to help the environment but will be used to bankroll the implementation of global government while swallowing up whatever deposable income impoverished Americans have left.

The government has aggressively exploited the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to manufacture an artificial urgency in an effort to speed the passage of cap and trade, an agenda firmly supported by the transnational oil corporations Obama is claiming to be reigning in. British Petroleum is one of the founding members of the cap and trade lobby, and has consistently “lobbied for tax hikes, greenhouse gas restraints, the stimulus bill, the Wall Street bailout, and subsidies for oil pipelines, solar panels, natural gas and biofuels.”

The elite are still desperate to impose a consumption tax on Americans as part of the move towards a “post-industrial revolution” and the kind of nightmare “green economy” that has left Spain with a 20 per cent unemployment rate. In a so-called green economy, over 2.2 jobs are lost for every “green job” created. Electricity prices in Spain have “skyrocketed” since the implementation of these policies, according to a leaked government report.

After 70 days of failure, White House accepts help with oil spill

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States is accepting help from 12 countries and international organizations in dealing with the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The State Department said in a statement Tuesday that the U.S. is working out the particulars of the help that's been accepted.

The identities of all 12 countries and international organizations were not immediately announced. One country was cited in the State Department statement -- Japan, which is providing two high-speed skimmers and fire containment boom.

More than 30 countries and international organizations have offered to help with the spill. The State Department hasn't indicated why some offers have been accepted and others have not.

PrisonPlanet charges BP oil spill was purposely contrived

There can now be no doubt whatsoever that the BP oil spill was purposefully contrived, either through deliberate negligence or outright sabotage, and is now being used to further the Obama administration’s political agenda. Criminal investigations into the government and BP’s role in the disaster need to be launched by state authorities in Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi immediately, while local authorities also need to call emergency legislative sessions in order to take over emergency response efforts from the feds before the crisis gets much worse.

While BP CEO Tony Hayward is busy watching yacht races, Barack Obama, who took two vacations immediately after the oil spill, spends his time playing golf. If this disaster is on a par 9/11 as Obama claims then why is he fiddling while Rome burns? Every effort to find a solution to this crisis while cleaning up the mess has been lackluster and half-hearted. The federal government’s hyped rhetoric about how bad the consequences of this spill will be has not been matched with the appropriate action to combat the problem.

In hindsight, it’s becoming clear that the government has deliberately botched the response and prevented local authorities from doing their jobs, just as FEMA deliberately sabotaged the state response to Hurricane Katrina in order to make the crisis worse and create the pretext for a police state response, gun confiscation and ultimately more federal power.

Numerous reports have surfaced of locals and state authorities being prevented by BP contractors and the U.S. Coast Guard from helping to address the devastation the spill has created in the region.

“(Louisiana) Governor Bobby Jindal had ordered the state’s fleet of sixteen vacuum barges to clean up oil in the Louisiana marshes. On Wednesday, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted the barges and ordered them to stop the cleanup. Ostensibly, the Coast Guard wanted to “inspect” the barges — but then it didn’t inspect them. It just ordered them back to dock and then did nothing,” reports Fort Liberty.

Just as happened with Katrina, BP in alliance with the feds have erected an ‘information blockade’ around the oil spill. Reporters have been harassed, threatened with arrest and prevented from accessing the affected areas. Oil spill clean up workers have been gagged from talking about their experiences. Foreign ships have been prevented from helping in the clean up process. Every effort has been made to stop the truth about the oil spill from being uncovered – almost everything we learn about the situation comes directly from BP or the federal government. This strictly enforced cover-up shows that authorities are more concerned about protecting their information lock down than actually cleaning up the spill.

This is part of what the Pentagon calls “psychological information warfare” and it is intended to deceive and confuse the enemy (the American people) so that they don’t uncover the truth.

The Jones Act, which forbids foreign ships from operating between U.S. ports, can be waived in cases of national emergencies or in cases of strategic interest. Belgian company DEME contends that it has the specialist vessels to fix the oil leak within two to four months, technology the U.S. does not have. By taking bids on a contract to fix the oil leak from international companies, Obama could have the problem solved within a matter of weeks, but he immediately refused the help of “thirteen entities that had offered the U.S. oil spill assistance within about two weeks of the Horizon rig explosion.” This is another clear example of the government’s motivation to allow the crisis to drag on indefinitely until they can use it to ram through their environmental agenda, which we shall cover shortly.

Every indication points to the oil spill having been deliberately caused, either by negligence or sabotage, by a combination of BP executives and those who hold the reigns of power in the Obama administration. This goes beyond Obama himself, who is merely there to read the teleprompter and employ his fine acting skills in selling the agenda that the globalists hope to enforce on the back of this contrived crisis.

On May 27, the New York Times reported on how just days before the explosion, BP chose to use a salt-water solution to seal the cement around the casing pipe which was known to be a far riskier option that the stronger heavy drilling fluid.

The choice of using a weaker salt-water solution, in light of the safety concerns surrounding the oil well in the weeks and months before the explosion, prompted heated arguments between a BP official and crew members employed by Transocean, the rig’s owner, on the morning of the blast, according to Douglas H. Brown, the chief mechanic for the Deepwater Horizon.

From the NYT, the best explanation so far of the BP disaster

It was the last line of defense, the final barrier between the rushing volcanic fury of oil and gas and one of the worst environmental disasters in United States history.

Its very name — the blind shear ram — suggested its blunt purpose. When all else failed, if the crew of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig lost control of a well, if a dreaded blowout came, the blind shear ram’s two tough blades were poised to slice through the drill pipe, seal the well and save the day. Everything else could go wrong, just so long as “the pinchers” went right. All it took was one mighty stroke.

On the night of April 20, minutes after an enormous blowout ripped through the Deepwater Horizon, the rig’s desperate crew pinned all hope on this last line of defense.

But the line did not hold.

For days, technicians and engineers worked furiously to figure out why, according to interviews and hundreds of pages of previously unreleased notes scrawled by industry crisis managers in the disaster’s immediate aftermath.

Engineers sent robotic submersibles 5,000 feet deep to prod the blind shear ram, nestled in the bosom of a five-story blowout preventer standing guard over the Macondo well.

They were driven on, documents and interviews reveal, by indications that the shear ram’s blades had come within a few maddening inches of achieving their purpose. Again and again, they tried to make the blades close completely, knowing it was their best chance to end the nightmare of oil and gas billowing into the Gulf of Mexico.

“If that would’ve worked,” a senior oil industry executive said of the blind shear ram, “that rig wouldn’t have burned up and sunk.”

Imhofe: With 53 senators opposed, Senate will block cap-trade

One would think that, when it comes to the Gulf spill, our top priorities would be as follows: plug the leak, mitigate and clean up the environmental damage, and provide help to those affected by it. But as President Obama indicated in his Oval Office address last Tuesday night, he sees things quite differently.

In his address President Obama found occasion to trumpet his radical cap-and-trade agenda for the nation’s energy sector. He referred approvingly to the disastrous Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, which the House narrowly passed last summer. He sent clear signals that he wants the Senate to pass a “strong and comprehensive clean energy and climate bill,” which are Obama code words for cap-and-trade, mandates, taxes, and bureaucracy.

But the Senate will pass no such legislation, because opposition to it runs deep. The vote on June 10 on Sen. Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) resolution to overturn the Obama EPA’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases is a case in point. Though it failed, 47 to 53, it became clear as the debate progressed that there is a bipartisan majority in the U.S. Senate that either opposes any EPA greenhouse gas regulation, or wants such regulation delayed for two years. That latter option has been proposed by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D.-W.Va.), who voted for the Murkowski resolution.

Thus far, at least six Democrats have pledged support for Rockefeller’s two-year delay. Those six Democrats stole victory away from Murkowski, but combined with the 47 ‘yes’ votes on the resolution (six of whom were Democrats), there are 53 members of the Senate who want to stand in EPA’s way. What’s more, these same senators want nothing to do with Obama’s radical cap-and-trade agenda.

In designating the oil spill the worst, Obama downgrades the Dust Bowl, floods, deforestation and extermination of bison

From the Oval Office the other night, President Obama called the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.” Senior people in the government have echoed that language.

The motive seems clear. The words signal sympathy for the people of the Gulf Coast, an acknowledgment of the magnitude of their struggle. And if this is really the worst environmental disaster, the wording seems to suggest, maybe people need to cut the government some slack for failing to get it under control right away.

But is the description accurate?

Scholars of environmental history, while expressing sympathy for the people of the gulf, say the assertion is debatable. They offer an intimidating list of disasters to consider: floods caused by human negligence, the destruction of forests across the entire continent and the near-extermination of the American bison.

“The White House is ignoring all the shades and complexities here to make a dramatic point,” said Donald E. Worster, an environmental historian at the University of Kansas and a visiting scholar at Yale.

The professors also note the impossibility of ranking such a varied list of catastrophes. Perhaps the worst disaster, they say, is always the one people are living through now.

Still, for sheer disruption to human lives, several of them could think of no environmental problem in American history quite equaling the calamity known as the Dust Bowl.

“The Dust Bowl is arguably one of the worst ecological blunders in world history,” said Ted Steinberg, a historian at Case Western Reserve University.

Across the High Plains, stretching from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakotas, poor farming practices in the early part of the 20th century stripped away the native grasses that held moisture and soil in place. A drought that began in 1930 exposed the folly.

Boiling clouds of dust whipped up by harsh winds buried homes and cars, destroyed crops, choked farm animals to death and sent children to the hospital with pneumonia. At first the crisis was ignored in Washington, but then the apocalyptic clouds began to blow all the way to New York, Buffalo and Chicago. A hearing in Congress on the disaster was interrupted by the arrival of a dust storm.

Obama is taking a big hit on his handling of the BP oil spill

Some observers have noted that while President Obama has faced intense criticism over his handling of the Gulf Oil spill during the last eight weeks, his approval rating remains more or less unchanged. Indeed, on April 21, the day after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sunk in the Gulf, President Obama’s approval rating in the RCP Average stood at 47.9% and his disapproval rating was at 46.9%. Despite all that’s transpired over the past two months, today President Obama’s approval rating in the RCP Average is two tenths of a point higher, at 48.1%, and his disapproval rating is five tenths of a point higher at 47.4%.

Much like the spill itself, however, below the surface there are indications that a subtle – and perhaps serious - erosion of the President’s image is taking place. While the most recent batch of polls does show President Obama’s overall job approval remaining steady, approval of his handling of the Gulf spill in particular has nose dived.

Three polls (AP/Gfk, CNN/Opinion Research, and Fox News/Opinion Dynamics) have tracked an approval rating for the President’s handling of the oil spill over the past month. Here are the trends:

Obama following path that led Spain to the edge of ruin

Washington, D.C. -- Barack Obama doesn't do the mundane. He was sent to us to do larger things. You could see that plainly in his Oval Office address on the Gulf oil spill. He could barely get himself through the pedestrian first half: a bit of BP-bashing, a bit of faux-Clintonian "I feel your pain," a bit of recovery and economic mitigation accounting. It wasn't until the end of the speech -- the let-no-crisis-go-to-waste part that tried to leverage the Gulf Coast devastation to advance his cap-and-trade climate-change agenda -- that Obama warmed to his task.

Pedestrian is beneath Obama. Mr. Fix-It he is not. He is world-historical, the visionary, come to make the oceans recede and the planet heal.

How? By creating a glorious, new, clean green economy. And how exactly to do that? From Washington, by presidential command and with tens of billions of dollars thrown around. With the liberal (and professorial) conceit that scientific breakthroughs can be legislated into existence, Obama proposes to give us a new industrial economy.

But is this not what we've been trying to do for decades with ethanol, which remains a monumental boondoggle, economically unviable and environmentally damaging to boot? As with yesterday's panacea, synfuels, into which Jimmy Carter poured billions.

Notice that Obama no longer talks about Spain, which until recently he repeatedly cited for its visionary subsidies of a blossoming new clean energy industry. That's because Spain, now on the verge of bankruptcy, is pledged to reverse its disastrously bloated public spending, including radical cuts in subsidies to its uneconomical photovoltaic industry.

David Warren: Bush had a a competent staff to deal with Katrina, while Obama "has loaded up a ship of fools"

We learned a simple thing this week: that the BP clean-up effort in the Gulf of Mexico is hampered by the Jones Act. This is a piece of 1920s protectionist legislation, that requires all vessels working in U.S. waters to be American-built, and American-crewed.

So while, for instance, the U.S. Coast Guard can accept such help as three kilometres of containment boom from Canada, they can't accept, and therefore don't ask for, the assistance of high-tech European vessels specifically designed for the task in hand. This is amusing, in a way: a memorable illustration of ... the sort of stuff I keep going on about. Which is to say, the law of unintended consequences, which pertains with especial virulence to all acts of government regulation.

Reagan and Thatcher were eloquent on this, but made little progress against entrenched interests. My reader may imagine exactly what entrenched interest keeps the Jones Act in place. A large part of the function of all regulatory bureaucracies is granting exemptions to the moronic rules. This, in turn, creates the conditions for massive corruption, and in the case at hand, the phenomenon of "regulatory capture" -- regulators and regulatees working hand-in-glove.

It is the stuff that brilliant Scottish moralist, Adam Smith, warned us against back in 1776. A "symbiotic relationship" tends to evolve, in 100 per cent of cases, between the big businesses that dominate an industry, and the big government that regulates them. They share such common interests as eliminating competition.

Now, an exemption can be granted even to the Jones Act: by executive order, all the way to the top. This was granted, promptly, by the Bush administration, when it was organizing the rescue arrangements that responsible local authorities had failed to provide, at the time of Hurricane Katrina. Which was, incidentally, a vastly larger environmental catastrophe than the piddling oil leak that now commands the news.

But the Bush administration had a huge advantage over its successor. Bush had gone out of his way to find competent people, with experience of their fields, to staff his administration. Many were despised throughout the media for their known conservative tendencies, but what can you do? For another axiom of David Warren Thought is that everyone is conservative, in a field he knows something about.

Reciprocally, there is a tendency to sport more and more liberal views, the greater one's ignorance of a field (and therefore of its constraints). And let me note, caustically, that President Obama is pretty liberal right across the board.

Bush had not, as his successor has, loaded up a ship of fools consisting of academic ideologues, under no particular direction from a captain who is himself off playing golf, and partying with America's coolest people. Which is exactly what Obama was doing for weeks after April 20, when Deepwater Horizon blew up; though to be fair we should also mention the fundraisers and commencement speeches. But there is little evidence that, away from his TelePrompTer, he does anything except appoint more fools to run the government for him.

Critics argue Obama, in deference to unions, fails to deploy all available equipment to ameliorate spreading Gulf oil spill

President Obama is impeding clean-up efforts in the Gulf by kowtowing to unions and members of the American maritime industry, critics have charged in recent days. At issue is the president’s refusal to waive the Jones Act, a century-old law that effectively bars foreign-owned ships from moving between U.S. ports, a necessary component of participating in the cleanup effort.

When asked why President Obama hasn’t waived the Jones Act — which President Bush put on hold to facilitate Katrina rescue efforts — White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said a suspension wasn’t necessary.

But Sen. Bill Nelson, Florida Democrat, and others say the act is keeping boats from getting on the water to lay boom and skim oil. In a letter to the Coast Guard’s Thad Allen, Nelson wrote:

Admiral, I believe the orange mousse of oil that is now in Florida’s waters is more than enough evidence that we need to take advantage of every appropriate global resource. Please advise as to whether we are taking full advantage of the offers of assistance from other countries.

Members of the American shipping industry, (arguably the sole beneficiary of Jones) are open to waiving the Jones Act in dire circumstances, but insist that as of right now: “American vessels are doing the job.”

“Countless American vessels are already responding in the Gulf. In addition, we know that many other American vessels are standing by ready to help,” reads a statement released Friday by the Maritime Cabotage Task Force, a lobbying group that represents scores of both unionized and nonunionized employees and employers in the American maritime industry.

The presser goes on to say that the maritime industry “has not and will not stand in the way of the use of these well-established waiver procedures to address this crisis,” so long as the Obama administration can prove that there aren’t American vessels willing to help but waiting in the wings.

MTCF spokesman Mark Ruge confirms that his organization, which represents groups as disparate as the AFL-CIO and the Goodtime Cruise Line, has communicated its position to White House officials.

Adm. Thad Allen: "The enemy is coming ashore."

Hours before the president's press conference, an ominous plume of oil six miles wide and 22 miles long was discovered snaking its way toward Mobile Bay from BP's wellhead next to the wreckage of its Deepwater Horizon rig. Admiral Thad Allen, the U.S. commander overseeing the cleanup, framed the spill explicitly as an invasion: "The enemy is coming ashore," he said. Louisiana beaches were assaulted by blobs of oil that began to seep beneath the sand; acres of marshland at the "Bird's Foot," where the Mississippi meets the Gulf, were befouled by shit-brown crude – a death sentence for wetlands that serve as the cradle for much of the region's vital marine life. By the time Obama spoke, it was increasingly evident that this was not merely an ecological disaster. It was the most devastating assault on American soil since 9/11.

Like the attacks by Al Qaeda, the disaster in the Gulf was preceded by ample warnings – yet the administration had ignored them. Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even before taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency's culture of corruption. He permitted it to rubber-stamp dangerous drilling operations by BP – a firm with the worst safety record of any oil company – with virtually no environmental safeguards, using industry-friendly regulations drafted during the Bush years. He calibrated his response to the Gulf spill based on flawed and misleading estimates from BP – and then deployed his top aides to lowball the flow rate at a laughable 5,000 barrels a day, long after the best science made clear this catastrophe would eclipse the Exxon Valdez.

Hours after BP’s rig sank on April 22nd, a white board in NOAA's "war room" in Seattle displays the administration's initial, worst-case estimate of the spill — 64,000 to 110,000 barrels a day.

Even after the president's press conference, Rolling Stone has learned, the administration knew the spill could be far worse than its "best estimate" acknowledged. That same day, the president's Flow Rate Technical Group – a team of scientists charged with establishing the gusher's output – announced a new estimate of 12,000 to 25,000 barrels, based on calculations from video of the plume. In fact, according to interviews with team members and scientists familiar with its work, that figure represents the plume group's minimum estimate. The upper range was not included in their report because scientists analyzing the flow were unable to reach a consensus on how bad it could be. "The upper bound from the plume group, if it had come out, is very high," says Timothy Crone, a marine geophysicist at Columbia University who has consulted with the government's team. "That's why they had resistance internally. We're talking 100,000 barrels a day."

The median figure for Crone's independent calculations is 55,000 barrels a day – the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez every five days.

Could it be that Obama doesn't feel anybody' else's pain?

One prominent Democrat, however, said that the entire situation – the use of such strong language to compensate for Obama’s more cerebral and stoic personality — exposed a void in Obama’s leadership style.

“Politics is about something much deeper than problem-solving. The essence of morality is empathy. If you feel someone’s pain the chances are you’re a good person. The Golden Rule is basically: Feel someone else’s pain,” the veteran Democrat told The Daily Caller.

“And when you cast yourself as the problem-solver in chief — devoid of empathy, denigrating empathy — you had damn well better solve the problem. Anyone out there think we’ve solved the BP spill? Or unemployment? Or the deficit? No. Problem-solving takes time, and the only way voters will give you the time you need is by showing them you’re on their side,” said the Democrat consultant, who asked not to be identified in order to speak more frankly.

Public attitudes about Obama’s leadership have been slipping for some time. A little-noticed set of numbers in a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Tuesday showed that on two questions — whether Obama “understands the problems of people like you,” and whether he is “a strong leader” — the president lost ground in the last three months, which continues a downward trend since his election.

Astronaut-geologist Harison Schmitt: Compared with Apollo 13 rescue mission in 1970, White House oil spill performance in Gulf is "politically charged, incompetent, fearful and hesitant"

I am honored to present this guest post by Apollo 17 astronaut and geologist Dr. H. Harrison Schmitt – Anthony:

President Obama’s Administration and its supportive media repeatedly say our 1970 Apollo 13 experience is analogous to the effort to contain and cap the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Not hardly!

The rescue of Astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, after an oxygen tank explosion on their spacecraft, illustrates how complex technical accidents should be handled, in contrast to the Gulf fiasco. Nothing in the government’s response to the blowout and explosion on the Deepwater Horizon and its aftermath bears any resemblance to the response to the Apollo 13 situation by the National Aeronautic and Space Administration and its Mission Control team at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.

“Failure was not an option” for Gene Kranz and his Apollo 13 flight controllers and engineers. In contrast, failure clearly has been an option for President Obama and those claiming to have been on top of this situation “from day one” in his White House and in the Departments of Interior, Energy and Homeland Security. With no single, competent, courageous and knowledgeable leader in charge of a comparably competent, courageous and knowledgeable team as we had with Apollo 13, the Administration has been doomed to failure from the start. The President, without any experience in real-world management of anything, much less a crisis, has no idea how to deal with a situation as technically complex as the Gulf oil spill.

Whatever may be the culpability of British Petroleum and its federal regulators in causing and dealing with the accident, it has been left to BP engineers and managers and to Gulf State officials to respond as best they can in a regulatory environment that is politically charged, incompetent, fearful and hesitant.

Absolutely no reason exists to assume that any part of the Federal Government has engineering expertise comparable to the petroleum industry that can be applied to this or any future energy-related crisis. Certainly, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu have no more experience in these matters than does the President.

Salazar’s empty threat to “push BP out of the way” has no basis as a realistic option and best illustrates the floundering of the Obama Administration. Indeed, from “day one,” the expertise of the entire U.S. and British drilling and production industry should have been mobilized to combat this spill, with a single experienced engineering manager in charge. It still is not too late to start doing it right.

Will government growth bring more drug abuse and porn?

One of the most popular features on my radio program is entitled "Had Enough Government Yet?"

Driven by daily media stories of nanny state, busy-body politics at the local, state, and federal level, the feature invites listeners to contribute their own stories and contemplate how far we've come in this country from the Jeffersonian ideal of "He, who governs least, governs best".

For example, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to regulate the amount of salt that chefs can put into restaurant food. Congress prepares legislation that would have the federal government define what "food" is, license it, and regulate and inspect every "food" source, including your back yard garden and the local farmers' market.

Another example: An agency of the federal government, mirrored in many state governments, decries childhood obesity (using standards that make Arnold Schwarzenegger in his "Terminator" days overweight) and proposes to regulate the fat content of all "food." At the same time, another set of federal and state agencies cuts physical education classes in high school and feeds junk food to the students at our expense. And then are surprised by an "epidemic" of fat kids.

The BP Deepwater Horizon, the most federally regulated offshore oil drilling rig ever, blows out one mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico in the worst oil spill disaster ever. In the spirit of using every crisis to advance the liberal agenda, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar proposes to abolish the single agency in charge of regulating and inspecting offshore rigs, and replacing it with three new federal agencies.

In fairness, Salazar had to do something drastic when it was discovered that the agency whose oversight failed to prevent the blowout was peppered with employees who spent their time doing drugs, taking bribes from the oil industry, and surfing the web for porn. The agency was known as the Minerals Management Service. Now comes the latest on the MMS, or as I call it, the Meth and Mammaries Service.

We have a detached, out-of-touch president and an oil spill that reminds us of "the monster that lives deep beneath the sea"

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They're in one reality, he's in another.

President Obama promised on Thursday to hold BP accountable in the catastrophic Gulf of Mexico oil spill and said his administration would do everything necessary to protect and restore the coast.

.The American people have spent at least two years worrying that high government spending would, in the end, undo the republic. They saw the dollars gushing night and day, and worried that while everything looked the same on the surface, our position was eroding. They have worried about a border that is in some places functionally and of course illegally open, that it too is gushing night and day with problems that states, cities and towns there cannot solve.

And now we have a videotape metaphor for all the public's fears: that clip we see every day, on every news show, of the well gushing black oil into the Gulf of Mexico and toward our shore. You actually don't get deadlier as a metaphor for the moment than that, the monster that lives deep beneath the sea.

After promising "relentless response" to oil spill, White House grants 27 exemptions from in-depth environmental studies

WASHINGTON — Since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico.

The waivers were granted despite President Barack Obama’s vow that his administration would launch a “relentless response effort” to stop the leak and prevent more damage to the gulf. One of them was dated Friday — the day after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he was temporarily halting offshore drilling

The exemptions, known as “categorical exclusions,” were granted by the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) and included waiving detailed environmental studies for a BP exploration plan to be conducted at a depth of more than 4,000 feet and an Anadarko Petroleum Corp. exploration plan at more 9,000 feet.

“Is there a moratorium on off shore drilling or not?” asked Peter Galvin, conservation director with the Center for Biological Diversity, the environmental group that discovered the administration’s continued approval of the exemptions. “Possibly the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history has occurred and nothing appears to have changed.”

Is that South Carolina doomsday clock still ticking off the remaining seconds in Graham's term?

WASHINGTON — Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the chief sponsors of a nascent plan to address energy and climate change in the Senate, said Friday that the proposal had no chance of passage in the near term and called for a “pause” in consideration of the issue.

But his two co-sponsors, Senators John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, vowed to press forward with a broad energy and global warming plan next week. They have been working with the White House and an array of business and environmental groups to fashion a package designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce dependence on foreign oil and create millions of clean-energy jobs.

But Mr. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said that the current political climate had made it impossible to consider such a difficult subject. In a statement Friday, he said that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico had heightened concern about expanded offshore drilling, which he considers a central component of any energy legislation. Mr. Graham also said that Democratic insistence on taking up immigration policy before energy had chilled his enthusiasm for any global warming measure.

Without the support of Mr. Graham and at least a handful of Republicans, the measure may well be dead for the year. Mr. Graham praised Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lieberman for their efforts, but said he would not join them.

“As I have previously indicated, a serious debate on energy legislation is significantly compromised with the cynical politics of comprehensive immigration reform hanging over the Senate,” Mr. Graham said in a statement. “In addition to immigration, we now have to deal with a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which creates new policy and political challenges not envisioned in our original discussions. In light of this, I believe it would be wise to pause the process and reassess where we stand.”