Obama administration policies have caused “irreperable harm” to the Gulf Coast economy, stifling the energy sector and culling employment within it to a degree previously underestimated by the administration itself.

That is the conclusion drawn by Louisiana State University economics professor, Dr. Joseph Mason, author of a new critique of the Obama administration’s Inter-Agency Economic Report released last week estimating losses due to the deepwater drilling moratorium currently in effect.  According to Dr. Mason, that report understated the ban’s impact on job losses by as much as 60 percent.

During a conference call Tuesday, Mason criticized the administration’s methodology for calculating the economic effects of the ban, and said the administration used inflated, flawed logic to calculate its valuation of economic offsets—such as unemployment wages—and their counter effects on the economic downturn. He said the report was inaccurately rosy in describing the Gulf States’ economic recoveries following the BP spill.

“Those states have been irreparably harmed,” Mason said. “Essentially all of these economies have taken the summer off and are trying to get back to the baseline.”

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It has been almost three months since the oil spill in the gulf. However, there has been little attention given to the health effects of exposure to the various components present in the spill or the chemical used to disperse the oil.

The contents of the oils spill contain several components. Each has the potential to cause health risks to those who are exposed to them. These are some facts of some of the most toxic substances:

1.  Benzene

Is a colorless liquid that has a somewhat sweet odor. It evaporates in air quickly and can dissolve into water. Therefore, it can be present in rain water carried distances and can have an effect on the ground a distance from the original source. Reports from the EPA have put the amount of Benzene measured near the Gulf of Mexico at 3,000-4,000 parts per billion (normal 0-4ppb). The EPA has set the minimum benzene exposure in drinking water at 5 ppb and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has placed safe exposure of benzene at 1part per million parts of workplace air for 8 hour shifts in a 40 hour work week. The EPA considers it a carcinogen at 1,000 ppb. Exposure to benzene vapors can cause a myriad of symptoms from headaches, nausea, dizziness, and drowsiness to rashes, respiratory difficulty. It has also beenlinked to leukemia and lymphoma. More Benzene Facts

2.  Hydrogen Sulfide

This is a colorless flammable gas that is highly toxic that has a characteristic  “rotten egg” odor.It is 20% heavier than air, and therefore will accumulate on the ground and in confined spaces. At concentrations above 100 ppm the olfactory nerve (the nerve that controls the sense of smell) is affected and the person can no longer detect the foul smell. However, if the person has a prolonged exposure to a low concentration the ability to detect the smell will also be lost. Exposure to the gas at low concentrations (0-10 ppm) can cause eye, nose and throat irritation. At moderate concentrations (10-50 ppm) it can cause headache, dizziness, nausea and vomiting and cough. Respiratory difficulty; and at high concentrations (50-200 ppm) it can cause convulsions, coma and death. The EPA has measured the level of hydrogen sulfide gas in the gulf at 1000 ppm (the normal is 5-10 ppb).Most countries put a safe legal limit in the work environment of 10 ppm. In addition, protective equipment such as air respirators is mandated.More Safety Facts

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I sat chuckling all through Obama’s immigration speech Thursday. Forgive me, but that has been my recent response whenever I listen to Obama’s speechifying. I am somewhat surprised at my recent response to his outlandish rhetoric, but he makes such a mockery of his very words, of America, and of capitalism, that he is, invariably, comical.

He recited Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus,” which is engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty, yet he has disparaged American exceptionalism and prides himself on being post-American. How can you not bust a gut?

So I listened to his speech on immigration and chuckled as he lectured us, yet again, on what America is — as if he had a clue about what America is. His contempt for us is so palpable. As if he had any respect for what makes America great – free speech, individual rights, entrepreneurship, and privacy rights. As if he had a clue as to why legal immigrants come here — to escape tyrants and would-be tyrants like him.

I understand why he must ram immigration through now. And why he is taking this issue on now after destroying the American healthcare system. He has no shot of re-election without a base of amnestied illegal immigrants voting for Democrats. It is his only motive — but I digress.

What about the Gulf? This is a catastrophe of unfathomable proportions, the decades-long repercussions of which have not yet begun to be understood or calculated. What about those people, those communities? Whole swaths of coastline, entire towns, even entire counties may face evacuation.

Why isn’t the President of the United States working on the problem 24/7? I want to know why the nation’s Chief Executive has not been holed up in a war room, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the past 72 days, working with the world’s finest scientific minds and oceanographic and energy experts to solve the oil spill crisis.

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As the saying goes, this would be funny, if it was not so serious.  As each day of the Obama Administration wears on, the disconnect between reality and the Administration, between America and Washington, just keeps growing.  Consider these examples among many:

The Bank Bill:  Does it bother anyone that the same Congress that is giving us $1.5 trillion deficits as far as the eye can see is writing a 2000 page bill telling banks how to balance their books?  Unfortunately, by almost all accounts but Congress’ – this bill will make lending more difficult, and therefore prolong our recession, at the same time it exposes America to more bailouts for lack of leverage reform.

Russia Spies:  According to a Justice Department official the charges are “’the tip of the iceberg’ of a Russian intelligence conspiracy against the United States.”  Obama knew about the charges prior to a meeting with the Russian President but there is no word on whether he brought it up let alone scolded the Russians.  To the contrary, according to the State Department: “the arrests merely show that the two countries have not yet reached the level of “trust and cooperation” where they can be completely open with one another” and Obama “had no “personal reaction” to the case and that the arrests should not hurt the administration’s attempts to mend fences with Moscow. “I do not believe that this will affect the reset of our relationship with Russia,” according to White House Spokesman Gibbs.  I am certain Putin (and Iran, the Taliban, and anyone else fighting the US) are so very relieved.

The Oil Spill.  Government regulations push oil drilling farther and farther offshore thereby making it a riskier undertaking.  BP takes even more risks and together we get an enormous spill.  Obama says he is in charge of the clean-up – literally – yet day after day after day (70 to be exact) Obama stopped skilled, foreign parties from helping and allowed the damage to increase well and way beyond what should have been the case.  Obama wants BP’s shareholders (they own BP and they are the people paying the price) to pay for it all but shouldn’t BP’s shareholders wonder why the US government made the problem worse and, therefore, demand what lawyers call a finding of comparative fault? – thereby making the US government (you and me) pay for some of the damage?

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The president’s recent disappointing oval office speech elicited a chorus of criticism from across the political spectrum.  For some reason the speech seems to have put a spotlight on the president as a leader, whereas other misjudgments in which he was directly involved in making policy had not.  The oil spill, which was certainly no fault of Mr. Obama, seems to have finally caused the public and many of his cheerleaders among the pundits to focus on the president’s substance and not his style.  That has been the unspoken, elephant-in- the-room, concern throughout his presidency, his aptitude for leadership.  We are reminded of the lead-in lyrics to the signature song Ethel Merman belts out in Gypsy… “Curtain up…light the lights…you either got it…or you ain’t.”

President Obama seems to have the curtain up, light the lights part down pat.  The dramatic campaign and convention stage sets, his world photo-op tours, his big oval-office backdrop to his little oval-office speech, and his ever-masterful use of the teleprompter have all produced a “strike-up-the-band” expectation whenever and wherever he appears. It’s the “you either got it, or you ain’t” part that seems finally to have focused the public on the president’s aptitude for leadership.

The befouling glob that threatens hundreds of miles of coast or, as Peggy Noonan put it recently so aptly in the Wall Street Journal, “the monster from under the sea,” seems to be a metaphor for the president’s inability to shape the world as he wants it to be.  Speeches are not a substitute for coherent policy.  The president, with the entire world watching his prime time speech, essentially punted.  He pulled from the presidential duck-and-cover arsenal the time-tested, yawn producer of presidents bereft of solutions to all manner of problems…the formation of a new blue-ribbon commission.  This was the cornerstone of his “battle plan” to face down the “siege” of big oil’s attack on our Gulf coast.

There is nothing more to be said about the quality of Mr. Obama’s oval-office speech debut.  It seems as if all the commentators from Chris Mathews, Keith Olberman and Jon Stewart on the left, to Mark Steyn, Charles Krauthammer and Karl Rove on the right have already done that.  Besides, there is something much more revealing that is apparent here.  It isn’t about the delivery by the man who gave the speech; it is, rather, about the man who delivered the speech.  The disappointing oval-office moment was more than just a lack of writing skill by some wordsmith presidential speechwriter; it focused the attention of the American people on the man himself and on what they hoped just wasn’t so; an apparent lack of the leadership aptitude which a president must possess if he or she is to succeed.

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With the passing of West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, the defining narrative among politicos will — after a few hours’ decorum — emerge as does Byrd = Kennedy? That is to say that, while so many West Virginians would never vote against Byrd, now that he’s gone there are plenty of the same Blue State voters who would vote against a non-Byrd Democrat in this Age of Obama.

I don’t follow West Virginia politics closely but assume their version of Scott Brown would be Rep. Shelley Moore Capito. His or her identity, as well as whether the same phenomenon would play out, likely depend on if the election is held this fall, vs. 2012: there are some murky legal issues to sort through involving how long a placeholder would hold the seat. Still I’m pretty sure it will be someone staunchly anti-cap-and-trade (in both parties, in fact; the last West Virginia politician to show insufficient zeal against the scheme, Rep. Alan Mollohan (D), recently lost in a primary).

Cap-and-trade of course is the vehicle by which the president vowed to cause your electricity prices to “necessarily skyrocket” as part of his effort to “bankrupt” the coal industry and anyone who sought to continue burning coal for that one-half of our electricity that it provides. Incidentally, today’s Wall Street Journal also notes how Obama’s anti-coal jihad just cost about 1,000 jobs in Wisconsin; West Virginia needs no such reminders yet as they pile up they also cannot help but be relevant.

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In the wake of the BP oil spill, efforts have been afoot on the part of the Obama administration to ban drilling off the U.S. coast outright, ostensibly to stop future disasters like that which continues to unfold in the Gulf.

Part of the rationale for such a proposed moratorium is the notion that BP’s practices were not uniquely bad among industry actors, but rather typical and common—a conclusion that appears to be reinforced by a cursory glance at records obtained from the Department of the Interior, as written up by Greenwire today:

To look at the safety records of the offshore drilling companies before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank on April 20, there was little difference between BP America Inc. and its peers in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

But in a revelation that Big Government readers are unlikely to find surprising, sources tell Capitol Confidential that a broader review of relevant governmental data demonstrates that in fact, BP had a far worse record on safety matters than other oil companies.

Indeed, by one measure, BP’s practices were exponentially less safe than those of environmentalists’ favorite oil industry bogeyman— Exxon-Mobil—a conclusion BP opponents say may support the proposition that a lighter touch regulatory approach, which does not punish companies with good safety records and standards, is more appropriate than a ban.

According to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) data compiled and detailed to Capitol Confidential, two refineries owned by BP accounted for an astonishing 97 percent of the most serious violations flagged by government inspectors in the last three years.

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Recent reports of Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, inspecting the beaches of Miami seem to be more of a photo oops than anything else.   Obviously, I’m sure he’s concerned with his state, the revenue lost from canceled vacations, and the impending negative effects environmental disaster from the BP oil spill, it remains curious, though, why he hasn’t been back to the Gulf coast since early June.   Instead he has recently traveled to Miami and Disney World–in central Florida–to address the spill.  Yes, he’s touting that Florida’s hot spots are safe, but more attention needs to be paid by the governor to the Gulf coast.

Meanwhile, the Florida beach report states:

The beaches and waters at tourist hot spots like Destin, Fort Walton Beach and Okaloosa Island are open, according to the Emerald Coast Convention and Visitors Bureau, which represents the three destinations.

“The air here is also still fresh and clean, with no smell of oil whatsoever,” the bureau’s website said.

This beaches may very well be open, but the conditions of the beaches are debatable.  Swimmers I have interviewed at Destin have reported being covered in a gloss of oil after swimming in the Gulf, the water is not clear, and piles of oil-soaked dead seaweed have washed up on the shore.

Additionally, this is what the Destin shore looks on June 17, 2010.  This picture is not algea, it is of oil-soaked seaweed washing up on the beaches in large quantities.

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On his first day in office, January 20, 2009, President Barack Obama issued a statement on the White House Web site promising Gulf Coast residents that his administration would not fail them like he accused his predecessor President George W. Bush.

Eighteen months later, those arrogant words are coming back to haunt Obama as the Gulf Coast is facing the third month of failure by Obama to marshall sufficient resources to protect the region from the massive BP oil spill.

“President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur.”

Politico reported the statement the day it was posted to a White House page titled “Additional Issues.”

Since then, the White House has edited the comment to remove the personal insult to President Bush so that it now reads:

“President Obama will keep the broken promises to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur. Within weeks of his inauguration, he made a renewed commitment to partner with the people of the Gulf Coast to rebuild now, stronger than ever.”

Based on the Politico report, the White House also edited out verbiage bragging about Obama’s post-Katrina trips to the region:

The site also points out that Obama “visited thousands of Hurricane survivors in the Houston Convention Center and later took three more trips to the region” and worked with the Congressional Black Caucus to help rebuild in the aftermath of Katrina.

The Obama administration has left a destructive trail of catastrophic failures in its wake over the BP oil spill, beginning with its failure to ensure that an adequate disaster plan was in place for BP’s Deepwater Horizon well to its failure to secure enough skimmers and booms to prevent the spill from reaching the shores of the Gulf states.

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Amidst all the political jockeying over the BP catastrophe, the main players are missing what is really uppermost on America’s mind: It’s the spill rate, stupid. It’s jobs, stupid. It’s the economy, stupid. And none of it is happening.

All eyes in Washington, Wall Street, and Main Street were turned this week to the congressional show trial featuring beleaguered BP CEO Tony Hayward. Hayward was a disaster. He played dumb. He stonewalled. And he never got honest about the colossal failure of human judgment at BP that caused this catastrophe.

But folks, seriously, what did you expect? Before this thing is said and done, Hayward and others at BP may very well be criminally indicted by the Justice Department. Hayward could eventually do hard time for all I know. So, of course, he stonewalled. Thank Eric Holder.

What Hayward should at least have done is talk about the progress being made in capping the spill rate, which is gradually going down. To most Americans, and especially those in the Gulf, it’s the spill rate of capture that matters most. Hayward also should have talked about the new BP relief well, which could be up and running in less than a month, to end this disaster. That would be great news for America, and her economy and stock market. Plus, he could have mentioned that BP is hiring thousands of workers to fill new jobs in the cleanup effort.

But Hayward was lawyered to the gills, which doesn’t make anyone happy, including me. And that’s precisely why these congressional show trials leave me bored, tired, and depressed.

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A few days ago, Texas Rep. Joe Barton, ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce Commitee “apologized” to BP for the pressure the Obama Administration put on the company to fund an escrow account to compensate victims of the Gulf Oil leak (which is still spewing oil, btw). Certain parts of the blogosphere are calling for his resignation. And, national Democrats have launched a new TV ad on the controversy.

Personally, we kinda think Barton’s calls for federal government oversight of college football is a more worthy contender to spark cries for his resignation. On this issue though, he think Glenn Reynolds summed it up best in this statement from The Hill:

The story of BP vs. the White House is a story of crooks being shaken down by thugs, with a liberal dose of incompetence on both sides. Barton was only pointing out the shakedown aspect, but he was certainly dead-on with regard to that.

The Louisiana oil crisis continues unabated. Oil continues to pollute the Gulf and the Obama Administration continues to fiddle while Louisiana suffers.

In addition to being angry with BP and the Obama Administration’s weak response, activists have taken to the street to protest Louisiana’s Senators’ support for a BP bailout. Apparently both Louisiana Senators decided to cater to the special interests and voted for the Durbin Amendment to the Financial Reform bill that would increase the profits of companies like BP by shifting the cost of credit transactions away from them and forcing consumers to pay for them instead.

Both parties are responsible for the passage of the Durbin Amendment to bailout BP and other big retailers.
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Judge Andrew Napolitano took the helm of the Glenn Beck Show and made a strong case against the Obama Administration’s handling of the oil disaster in the gulf. The Judge detailed how an incompetent government coupled with the crony capitalism of special interests laid the foundation for the current tragedy. Big Government’s Mike Flynn and the awesome pollster Pat Caddell joined in for the discussion.

Remember: The Gulf Oil Spill Is Like 9-11

Three days after the Gulf oil rig explosion, the Netherlands offered to send in oil skimmers to pump oil off of the surface of the ocean. The Obama Administration turned them down because they were not 100% efficient and small amounts of oil would be pumped back into the Gulf with the excess water. EPA regulations do not allow for residue water to contain any oil. So rather than use equipment that was not 100% efficient the Obama Administration chose to let all of the oil run into the Gulf.

This is not just bad policy, it is criminal.

Since the Obama Administration turned down assistance from The Netherlands at least 125 miles of Louisiana coastline has been ruined by the BP oil spill. Tar blobs began washing up on Florida’s white sand beaches near Pensacola days ago. And, crude oil has also been reported along barrier islands in Alabama and Mississippi.

Clean-up workers pick up blobs of oil in absorbent snare on Queen Bess Island at the mouth of Barataria Bay near the Gulf of Mexico in Plaquemines Parish, La., Friday, June 4, 2010. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

The Examiner reported, via Free Republic:

The U.S. Government has apparently reconsidered a Dutch offer to supply 4 oil skimmers. These are large arms that are attached to oil tankers that pump oil and water from the surface of the ocean into the tanker. Water pumped into the tanker will settle to the bottom of the tanker and is then pumped back into the ocean to make room for more oil. Each system will collect 5,000 tons of oil each day.

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President Barack Obama made news on The Today Show when he talked about kicking some ass over the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

If he is interested in punishing those responsible for what is shaping up as one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history, he should think about giving himself a boot.

While BP is ultimately responsible for the spill (and for cleaning it up), the federal government is a major player in the problem for at least three reasons:

1. It owns the property on which the oil well is located.

2. It regulates offshore drilling. And

3. In order to protect small players in the drilling industry, it capped economic damages from this sort of spill at just $75 million, a way-too-low cap that encourages risky behavior.

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The President of the United States is looking for an ass to kick.

“I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar,” he said Monday, “we talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.”

He is so embarrassing. What president talks with such false braggadocio? Would a Republican dog catcher get away with such vulgar invective? He is a disaster, and he lashes out when he is called out on any of his too-numerous-to-recount-here failures.

Bush was eviscerated, crucified for showing more competence in his pinky toenail during Katrina than Obama has demonstrated in the whole of this short, painful presidency. The media’s silence on his fumbling and stumbling is absolutely corrupt. If anyone should be impeached, it ought to be those useful idiots and fellow travelers. It is now a 24-hour bash BP news cycle.

Sarah Palin said:

50 days in, and we’ve just learned another shocking revelation concerning the Obama administration’s response to the Gulf oil spill. In an interview aired this morning, President Obama admitted that he hasn’t met with or spoken directly to BP’s CEO Tony Hayward. His reasoning: “Because my experience is, when you talk to a guy like a BP CEO, he’s gonna say all the right things to me. I’m not interested in words. I’m interested in actions.”

Sounds as if Obama doesn’t have much confidence in BP. He is right about that, since BP has been responsible for a large number of accidents in the last few years. The Washington Post reports this: “BP has had more high-profile accidents than any other company in recent years. And now, with the disaster in the gulf, independent experts say the pervasiveness of the company’s problems, in multiple locales and different types of facilities, is striking.”

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UNBELIEVABLE! How’s this for HOPE AND CHANGE?

Tar blobs began washing up on Florida’s white sand beaches near Pensacola this past weekend. Crude oil has already been reported along barrier islands in Alabama and Mississippi, and has impacted about 125 miles of Louisiana coastline.

It didn’t have to be this way.

(Reuters)
There are miles of floating oil containment boom in warehouse right now and the manufacturer Packgen says it can make lots more on short notice.
There’s just one problem… No one will come get it.

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We are almost seven weeks and counting into the massive oil spill wreaking havoc in the Gulf of Mexico and causing an unprecedented ecological disaster along the Louisiana coast.  Neither the owners of the well, BP America, or their contractual partners, rig owner, Transocean LTD or oil servicer, Halliburton Co., have yet been able to stop the flow, and so the duration and total damages, measured either in economic or environmental terms are yet to be known.

It should be obvious by now that getting control of the leak and, even after six weeks, limiting the disaster should be the only short-term objective of the President of the United States, federal regulators and Congress.  Finding the root cause to prevent a reoccurrence, assigning blame and allocating liability for damages can wait until all the facts are in.  As might be expected, however, all of the responsible parties have a different focus.

As far as the oil company executives are concerned, they feed us a daily dose of technological drivel, public relations statements and finger pointing.  At Congressional hearings each of the three companies blamed one another.  The truth is, since the accident occurred at a depth of almost one mile below the ocean’s surface, none of them know for sure what went wrong.  And how could they?  In an aviation disaster weeks and months go by before there is something akin to a conclusive finding, even though investigators from the airline involved and air traffic regulators are usually aided by either one or more of a black box (which offers a treasure trove of information), survivor accounts, witnesses, or air traffic recordings.  Moreover, with the nation’s contingency fee trial lawyers on the sidelines taking in every word of testimony for the soon to come class-action lawsuits and with the president publicly demanding, ex post facto, to raise the legal liability limit for the well’s owners and operators, it is a wonder they “voluntarily” testified at all.

With regard to the gulf oil spill we have no physical proof yet of what caused a cascade of problems, so why are almost all our elected officials focused on allocating blame.  Clearly, it is not for the purpose of learning from this disaster to prevent a reoccurrence.  Instead, as is almost invariably the case in Washington, a huge and important fact finding investigation is hijacked to score political points.

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For those of you who watched “Hannity” on Fox News last night and wondered why an “eco-entrepreneur” was left to address President Obama’s claim that the Gulf spill just means we need his cap-n-trade scheme, with no other guest, it was because a storm here in Central Virginia had me all made up pretty and sitting in the chair with the satellite connections fried out.

That was global warming, of course. Or George Bush.

But here is essentially the rejoinder that you would have heard:

Obama’s argument made in Pittsburgh goes that, with BP having been reckless and the administration incompetent…if you carry the 1 and tally it up it means a massive new tax increase on all of us to make energy more expensive.

This just makes sense in the land of never letting a crisis go to waste.

Which should remind us how to know there’s no good reason for an agenda: when the reason for the agenda, or rather the excuse, keeps changing. Now the global warming tax, which was then a climate change tax, then somehow a job-creation energy tax is now an energy tax to show how engaged and angry President Obama is at BP’s oil spill.

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If you’ve been watching the fiasco surrounding the oil spill in the gulf, you already know the mainstream media meme that has cropped up around it. “Yes, President Obama has failed to stop the spill thus far,” the press tell us. “Yes, he’s demonstrated that his promises of supreme competence were overblown. Yes, his leadership has become so questionable that even James Carville has attacked him for it. Yes, some of the alternatives being offered in spite of all of this are being ignored, and yes, President Obama has failed to inspire confidence among everyday Americans about his ability to handle this crisis. But one thing we will not deny is that President Obama cares. He is a man of deep humanity, and deep empathy (and where have we heard that word before) for the suffering of those affected by the spill, and he cares.”

What I am about to ask will require readers to engage in a supreme act of charity: Despite all the evidence to the contrary, all the evisceration which Rush Limbaugh and every other conservative commentator have piled on this administration, all the evidence that the media will never believe anything but the very best about this President even as he takes this country down the road to serfdom at a speed that would make Dale Earnhardt Jr feel queasy, and despite all the emotionless, meaningless, platitude-laden babble that the President has been spewing since the spill began, I want the readers to assume, just for the sake of argument, that the media is telling the truth. Despite what appear to be severe rhetorical and emotional shortcomings in his speeches and his own bearing, imagine that underneath the hyper-rational mask, President Obama really does care.

So what?

Has that “caring” done anything to stop the spill? Has it given President Obama one single, solitary constructive idea about how to solve the problem (other than “Plug the Hole,” that is)? Does President Obama have the ability to fly out to the Gulf Coast and, like Ma-Ti in Captain Planet, dissolve the oil with nothing but the magically empathic effusions of his beating heart? And if not, then even if we concede that President Obama cares about those affected by this crisis,  how is that remotely relevant to his ability to solve it? As per the usual liberal tag line, we are expected to believe that President Obama’s good intentions alone should assuage us of his competence, but have they done anything at all? The answer is as devastating as it is obvious: No.

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