During a trip to India a few years ago and after observing the New Delhi traffic, I devised a great idea for Tata, the Indian car maker: manufacture the cars so that once the car is started the horn turns on and stays on until the car is turned off.  I was sure the drivers in New Delhi would appreciate such a feature, seeing that they drive with the horn on most of the time anyway.

Kind of like the way that politicians of Indian descent are making their presence known in the American political scene, except maybe not as noisy.  While there are others, two prominent Indian-American politicians stand out: Louisiana Governor Piyush “Bobby” Jindal and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley.

Following two terms in Congress representing Louisiana’s 1st congressional district in the House, and having been the Congress’ second Indian-American, Republican Bobby Jindal was first elected governor of Lousiana in 2007 and re-elected earlier this year in a landslide.  Throughout his term as governor he has become known as a fiscal conservative who refused to raise taxes.  After the BP Oil Spill of April-July, 2010, Jindal loudly criticized Obama administration’s response and eventually persuaded the administration into lifting a permit moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

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Criticism continues to amass on the heels of the blog posted by the Whitehouse Wednesday boasting ‘Expanding Safe and Responsible Energy Production.” Attempting to drive home the point that, long before this current spike, their main concern rested in “increasing responsible domestic energy production – including oil and gas,” the Obama Administration engaged in a bit of revisionist history. In reality, actions taken by President Obama and his staff indicate that despite the rising cost of oil, there is little sense of immediacy to get one of our most profitable industries back to work.

The main argument behind the stagnant permitting, the Obama Administration maintains, is BP’s disasterous blowout in the Gulf, “protecting” Americans from the horrors that would no doubt ensue should deepwater drilling restart at a pre-Gulf oil spill clip. Forbes reporter Christopher Helman makes a valid point in exposing the disingenuous nature of the Obama administration’s willingness to issue permits: while the industry was not adequately prepared to clean up the spill, reports have shown that the main problem was in BP’s implementation of the well, not the overall industry’s handling of the disaster – nor the industry’s chances of a second failure. In fact, the chances of another spill have gone down significantly with the most recent set of safety procedures established by the Department of the Interior. Companies now have the technology to drill safely in deep water, and new measures are in place to contain and control a BP-sized blowout, in the (very) off chance such an incident should happen again. It was BP’s haste in building the well, not the industry’s haste in correcting the problem.

William Reilly, co-chair of the presidential panel tasked with investigating causes of the oil spill, remains impressed with the industry’s ability to respond to the disaster, The Hill reports.

“William Reilly, co-chair of the presidential panel tasked with investigating causes of the BP PLC (BP, BP.LN) oil spill, on Tuesday called the oil and gas industry’s response to the disaster ‘remarkable and reassuring,’” Dow Jones reports.

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The President of the United States was swept into office two years ago promising to bring change to Washington, starting with a more transparent and ethical government. In fact, Obama declared, “transparency and the rule of law would be the touchstones of this presidency.” Apparently, not everybody in the White House read the interoffice memorandum.

Following the BP tragedy, the White House commissioned the Secretary of the Interior to provide a safety report on offshore drilling. Secretary Salazar pulled in a panel of seven outside advisors to assist in his analysis of the safety of offshore drilling, and provide recommendations for going forward. A final draft of this report was sent to White House Climate Czar Carol Browner’s office before being forwarded to the president. Last week, it was reported that Browner’s staff edited the document to imply that the outside advisors recommended a drilling moratorium, when in fact this was not true. The tailored draft was given to the president, and the policy was made.

Whether or not the recommendation of outside advisors would have changed minds regarding the drilling ban is debatable. What isn’t debatable is the resulting economic destruction in the Gulf from President Obama’s decision based – in part – on information from a falsified document.

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Lost in the news of the elections is a blockbuster story soon to be swept under the carpet, Politico reports:

“The White House rewrote crucial sections of an Interior Department report to suggest an independent group of scientists and engineers supported a six-month ban on offshore oil drilling, the Interior inspector general says in a new report.

In the wee hours of the morning of May 27, a staff member to White House energy adviser Carol Browner sent two edited versions of the department report’s executive summary back to Interior. The language had been changed to insinuate the seven-member panel of outside experts – who reviewed a draft of various safety recommendations – endorsed the moratorium, according to the IG report obtained by POLITICO.”

In weasel words that even make this Washingtonian of twenty years blush, the Department of the Interior Inspector General writes:

“’The White House edit of the original DOI draft executive summary led to the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer-reviewed by the experts,’ the IG report states, without judgment on whether the change was an intentional attempt to mislead the public.” (emphasis added)

One can certainly “lead to an inference“. But … led to the implication? Oh, right. You are trying not to say “implied“.

This is Exhibit A why law school drill into every first year’s head do not use the passive voice. It obscures meaning, begs questions, and diminishes confidence and credibility in the speaker. You come off as trying to weaselly avoid saying something. Like this guy.

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It is Day 79 of the BP oil spill, and just this weekend tar balls from the spill washed up on Texas beaches.  Over a hundred million gallons of oil have been released into our waters.  And yet where is our President?  He spent the 4^th of July playing golf and hosting a barbeque on the White House lawn.  Apparently some people want the new “normal” to be an oil-ridden Gulf.

But we at The Heritage Foundation are not satisfied with this new norm.  So this week we are sending a team of respected energy, environment, homeland security and response experts to the Gulf region to investigate what is and is not working and what more needs to be done (or in many cases, where the federal government should simply step out of the way) to get the Gulf cleaned up.

Since the explosion on April 20, the outflow of oil has gotten worse, goals have been missed, and attention has waned on this horrible situation.  When the president last took questions from the press at the G20, not a single reporter asked him an oil spill related question.  It seems the mainstream media is more concerned with blaming BP for the spill than actually cleaning it up.  And while BP should not escape blame for the spill or their less-than-promised skimming abilities, the federal government should also be held to task for their less-than-efficient clean up operation.

Five years ago, the bureaucracy of state, local, and federal governments made the disaster after Hurricane Katrina worse.  And that bureaucracy is at work again, hindering the clean up efforts of the oil spill.

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t looks like President George W. Bush may have a pretty good birthday today. After all, this time last year the liberal media was terming him as “the worst president in American history.”

But a lot has changed since then.

History has proven that the challenges he faced during his presidency were much more daunting that anyone realized. In fact, shortly after the 2008 presidential election, Gallup ranked Bush’s popularity at only 27 percent and Obama’s at 70 percent.

Most of the country thought Obama would prove Bush totally incompetent, but since then a lot has happened, and Obama’s popularity, according to Gallup, has dropped 24 points to only 46 percent.

One of his lead generals has publicly criticized his handling of the war in Afghanistan and even former Bush senior adviser Karl Rove has equated the current administration’s handling of the BP disaster to of the BP disaster to what happened with Katrina. Some people have even suggested Obama’s handling of the BP disaster is much worse than the way the Bush administration handled Katrina. (more…)

I recently released a new web video challenging President Obama to focus on the American people’s priorities after the release of yet another disappointing jobs report. Last Friday we learned that our economy lost 125,000 jobs in the month of June, yet another example of how the President’s trillion-dollar ‘stimulus’ has failed to deliver the jobs he promised.  The video, entitled “What About The Country, Mr. President?,” features questions that I posed to the President regarding jobs, spending, the financial meltdown, and the Gulf oil spill.

SCRIPT: “WHAT ABOUT THE COUNTRY, MR. PRESIDENT?”

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In a rebuke to President Obama, a Senate panel last week gave a thumbs-up to the creation of an alternative Gulf oil spill commission to rival that previously announced by the President.

The bipartisan commission was approved by five Democrats and ten Republicans on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Its members would be determined mainly by Members of Congress, on a 50/50 Democrat/Republican basis, with President Obama retaining the power to appoint the Chairman.

The move followed intense criticism of President Obama’s own announced commission—composed in substantial part of anti-drilling members like Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke, and several individuals professionally focused on environmental law— from Democrats and Republicans alike.

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), one of those involved in the alternative-commission effort, said earlier this week that the Obama Gulf oil spill commission “appears to me to be stacked with people philosophically opposed to offshore drilling.”

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An old family friend, Daniel Sinykin, sends in the following video of his potential solution to the BP Oil disaster. His idea is an improvement on the hair based techniques that have received attention in the wake of the ongoing spill. (According to one report the hair booms are not being used because in early tests they became water logged and sank.)

In the following clips, Daniel demonstrates the potential effectiveness of using high density wool to soak up the oil.

Daniel is hoping for two things over the coming days and weeks. First, he hopes that field trials in the Gulf prove successful. And second, he hopes that he can get the attention of BP and Federal Government.

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A federal judge has, for the moment, spared already-suffering Gulf state residents from the brunt of President Obama’s most recent anti-energy Power Grab. It has enjoined the administration from implementing its moratorium on deepwater drilling. The Order is here, and the Opinion here.

The administration has vowed to appeal. Regardless of the outcome, this victory is temporary. As I detail in Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America, Obama and his administration are committed to strangling domestic energy production. At the same time they promise to also clamp down on the cost of consumption, all in a way that makes our last energy-poverty president, Jimmy Carter, appear a free-market pioneer.

This was telegraphed immediately after Obama’s inauguration by his by administration revoking massive tracts of public land from possible lease for domestic energy production, even to the point of suspending lease agreements already struck.

None of this is either accident or coincidence, but affirmed as a deliberate plan by Obama’s concurrent clamp-down on families’ access to energy with a cap-and-trade scheme he vowed would cause energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket”. Though he dared not speak the scheme’s name, Obama renewed his support for it in his Oval Office speech last Tuesday by praising the House-passed bill.

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Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse…

Last week Barack Obama told Politico that the BP oil spill was like 9-11–
But, it’s been over 60 days since the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and he’s only sent 20 of 2,000 US oil skimmer boats to the coast of Florida.

Senator George LeMieux of Florida told the Shark Tank that there are only 20 skimmer boats off the coast of Florida out of 2,000 available skimmer boats in the United States. Lemieux says that Obama is afraid to move them to Florida because there won’t be any in place in case there is an oil leak somewhere else.

…That sounds like Obama.

Via the Shark Tank:

Senator Lemieux is keeping a count on the number of skimmer boats the adminstration has working off the Florida coast on his website:

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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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Like most people I didn’t expect a lot from the President during his oval office speech. What I got was a whole new look at the Candidate in Chief.

The first thing I noticed during the speech: I had never seen such an empty desk before., It was so clear, you could see all the dents in the desk, from where the previous presidents actually did some work.

Much has been made about how President Obama didn’t really seem comfortable in the speech, that he looked more like a visiting college student who got to sit in the big chair for a couple minutes. It could explain why his poll numbers have dropped faster than a bowling ball out a campaign bus window.

It was also only a one tele-prompter speech. Usually he has a two tele-prompter setup so his head moves back and forth, like he’s watching a beer pong game.

It was highly uncomfortable to watch. His eyes were locked on the teleprompter, and his hands never stopped moving. You weren’t even sure the guy reading, was the same guy who was moving the hands. It was almost like watching the cookie monster give an oval office address.

I look at it a different way: from a comedian’s perspective. I’ve played some fairly hostile crowds during my years on the road. But the one kind of crowd I cannot tolerate is a small one. I think most comics will agree that one of the most terrifying places you can perform is to an empty room. (Of course since I’ve become big and famous, that rarely happens to me anymore.)

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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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From today’s Politico:

As the greatest environmental catastrophe in U.S. history has played out on Obama’s watch, the environmental movement has essentially given him a pass — all but refusing to unleash any vocal criticism against the president even as the public has grown more frustrated by Obama’s performance.

About a dozen environmental groups took out a full page ad in the Washington Post Tuesday – not to fault Obama over the ecological catastrophe but to thank him for putting on hold an Alaska drilling project. “We deeply appreciate your decision. . .,” the ad says to Obama.

“President Obama is the best environmental president we’ve had since Teddy Roosevelt,” Sierra Club chairman Carl Pope told the Bangor Daily News last week. “He obviously did not take the crisis in the Minerals Management Service adequately seriously, that’s clear. But his agencies have done a phenomenally good job.”

Some say there’s little doubt that if a spill like the one in the Gulf took place on former President George W. Bush’s watch, environmental groups would have unleashed an unsparing fury on the Republican in the White House. For their liberal ally, Obama, they seem willing to hold their tongues.

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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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Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is a rising star in the Republican Party, a true representative of the tea party spirit. She’s plainspoken, brilliant, and incisive. She’s running for re-election to the House in Minnesota. And today, I had the chance to pre-record an interview with Congresswoman Bachmann for my radio show, “The Ben Shapiro Show,” broadcast Sundays 1-4 PM EST on 810 AM in Orlando, FL. You can also listen live at big810am.com.

In the interview, Congresswoman Bachmann characterizes President Obama’s response to the BP spill as “infantile,” says he’s the worst president in American history, says he’s siding with the Islamic world against Israel. How’s that for guts! Take a listen:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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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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