Federal and state officials criticized BP on Friday for what they said was an inadequate response to the growing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. They urged the oil company to do more to stop a leaking undersea oil well 50 miles offshore as floating crude oil imperiled the fragile marshes of the Gulf coast.
At an afternoon press conference with other officials in Louisiana, Ken Salazar, the secretary of the interior, said he told BP officials and engineers at their command center in Houston “to work harder and faster and smarter to get the job done.”
“Those responsible,” he added, “will be held accountable.”
The disaster began with an explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig last week, which sank the rig and left 11 people missing and presumed dead and three more critically injured. The well the rig was drilling, 5,000 feet below the surface, is now leaking oil at a rate of about 5,000 barrels a day.
The rig was owned and operated by Transocean under lease to BP. Under federal law, BP must pay the cost of containing and cleaning up the oil.
Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who also spoke at the news conference, was forceful in his criticism of the company’s efforts to cope with the disaster.
“I do have concerns,” he said, “that BP’s current resources are not adequate to meet the three challenges we face.” For one, he said, the company had not managed to stop the well from leaking. For another, he said, the floating booms being used by the company had not been effective in halting the progress of the slick.
You all know what is going to come next, don’t you? After spending a few days getting no traction calling the oil spill in the Gulf “Obama’s Katrina,” it is going to be most excellent watching the usual suspects pirouette and attack Obama for being too hard on the oil industry.
Also, place your bets on which Sunday bobblehead will still attempt to call this “Obama’s Katrina.” My money is on David Gregory, as always.
me
drill baby spill
neill
well, i dont know if he’s a fuckin’ sunday bobblehead, but that god damn chris matthews — this sounds like it already came out of his rotten piehole.
mr. whipple
I had CNN on this morning, and the bubblehead asked, “is this Obama’s Katrina?”
It’s already started.
Chyron HR
Real-life twitter comment from a real-life twat:
Wow, that’s just brilliant. “ALGORE DID IT! WE MUST PUT PALIN IN POWER TO PROTECT US FROM THE EVIL ENVIRONMENTALISTS! P.S. Reichstag fire lolz.”
Gary D
Matt Drudge – already.
http://s3.mediamatters.org/static/images/item/drudge%20obama%20katrina.jpg
beltane
Obama’s had several Katrinas already according to the MSM. By using that phrase so indiscriminately, they are showing us that they really do not understand why the Bush administration was at fault during the actual Hurricane Katrina.
beltane
@Chyron HR: Al Gore will deploy his hippie stormtroopers to turn everyone’s hot water heater down five degrees. We must stop him!!
Elisabeth
“Obama’s Katrina” ~ the 1,948,345,042 reason to hate George Bush.
Darius
Pretty much, yeah. They’re also showing how they’re slaves to the latest right-wing meme, but we kinda knew that already, didn’t we?
Mike Kay
Is this Sarah Palin’s own “Death Panel”?
General Egali Tarian Stuck
If they don’t get that fucker turned off, it will be all the entire Gulf Coast’s Armageddon . Chalk another one up to the genius of mankind, for coming up with the brilliant idea you could drill for oil a mile deep on the ocean floor safely.
Mike Kay
“both sides do it”
mcd410x
Think about it. This was planned by Obama to pass his nefarious, sociogreen, cap&trade economic agenda.
Or something.
SGEW
It’s really hard to keep up with all of Obama’s Katrinas and Waterloos.
We need new historical metaphors! Where is Obama’s Battle of Blanc Mont Ridge? Or his sinking of the Maine?
Then again, we still have Obama’s Vietnam to get through, so it’s not all hurricanes and Napoleonic battles . . .
Zifnab
Or even, exactly, what the magnitude of the Katrina Hurricane – or, hell, the CAUSE of the Katrina Hurricane – actually was. Comparing a massive man-made oil spill to a gulf coast hurricane is like comparing a 40-car pile up to an earthquake.
I still don’t entirely know whether the media execs are this stupid, or whether they just think we are.
South of I-10
Equating this to Katrina is the fucking stupidest thing I have ever heard. Jindal made a comment about 3 hours after he declared a state of emergency, about where have the feds been. I don’t remember the feds swooping in every time there is a fucking oil spill. Hey John, following up from yesterday, here is your first oil covered bird.
Martin
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: Every CEO strategy: By the time they figure out what went wrong, we’ll be sitting on a beach, earning twenty percent.
freelancer
Just saw the snarling mass of vicious vitriolic jackals tag(paraphrasing).
Awesome sauce.
Martin
@South of I-10: Wait, I thought the free market was supposed to solve all of these problems. Maybe those shrimpers down there can go pressure BP to clean their shit up.
Mike G
For this to be Obama’s Katrina, he’d have to go on vacation and stay on vacation as the disaster unfolded, then grudgingly fly over the spill in AF1 as a publicity stunt after realizing he was coming across as a disinterested asshole. Then his lickspittle media propaganda cable channel, if he had any, would have to snap into action, blaming the birds for getting oily because they didn’t evacuate the wetlands (“They can fly, can’t they? And the fish can swim away? So what’s their problem”). Manufactured stories will abound about fish getting bounties of fishmeal they wouldn’t otherwise get, “so this is working out very well for them!”
A circus mime, medieval literature professor or other fish-out-of-water incompetent would have to be in charge of the containment, who Obama would blindly praise as doing a “heckuva job” while absolute disaster and bureaucratic paralysis reigned. Then the long-term cleanup and remediation would have to be an absolute crony-fest of incompetence, graft, partisan favoritism, cronyism and deliberate ineffectiveness to ideologically ‘prove’ that government is incapable and it should all be turned over to his buddies at Halliburton and Blackwater. And don’t forget some tax cuts.
So Obama’s got a long way down to match the Congo-like standards of government incompetence, fecklessness, criminality and borderline sabotage set by BushCo.
Kryptik
You say this as if there’d be only one bobblehead who would, John.
Mike Kay
is this Obama’s vomiting on the Japanese prime minster moment?
is this Obama’s secret bombing of Cambodia moment?
is this Obama’s getting shoes thrown him moment?
is this Obama’s “my pet goat” moment?
is this Obama’s blaming Saddam for 9/11 moment?
is this Obama’s suspending his campaign moment?
is this Obama’s can’t name a single newspaper moment?
is this Obama’s $170,000 wardrobe moment?
Is this Obama’s outing an undercover CIA moment?
Elisabeth
@South of I-10:
I thought the states wanted to take care of their own; funny how they want federal assistance only on their terms.
Mike in NC
With an able assist from co-host John McCain, of course.
Elisabeth
@Mike G:
You forgot about celebrating some halfwit’s birthday with cake no one bothered to eat.
handy
This. Absolutely this.
Redhand
With an able assist from co-host John[Drill Baby Drill!] McCain, of course.
Maude
When it comes to piouettes, you can’t top Dancin’ Dave.
South of I-10
@Martin: @Elisabeth: Here is the article I was referring to. It was a few hours after he declared a state of emergency. What a tool.
sukabi
@Mike G: you forgot the indiscriminate shooting of a few black folks just because.
Paula
Jesus. Hooocodanode that BP would lie to the gubmint about having their shit under control.
On an entirely selfish note: Thank you, fucktard oilmen, for pre-ruining my NOLA food-and-jazz vacation. The fishermen are apparently down to selling their last large catches of shrimp and oysters.
The only good thing about this is that it means Obama’s offshore drilling proposal is DOA for @ least 5 years.
jg
@Mike G:
this. grand slam. hall of fame.
this should be said everyday or until Rush vapor-locks free-basing oxy.
Midnight Marauder
@Mike G:
Do you mean like this:
kay
GM was Obama’s Katrina.
mr. whipple
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
We need some of them pearl diver women that can hold their breath a long time.
Martin
You know, Bush would have screamed over in Air Force One, ordered the general to come in low and fast, drop chaff, and light that shit on fire. As they pulled up, he’d click on the cockpit mike which was tied into the broadcast frequency for Fox Radio and scream “Yippie kay yay, motherfucker eco pukes! Now, let’s go nuke some Mexicans…”
What does Obama do? Get all elite and eggheady and talk about safety and regulation and responsibility. Americans fucking hate that shit.
soonergrunt
Gregory was already pimping this idea on the Today show this morning.
Elisabeth
@South of I-10:
The cynic in me suspects that the governor is, at a minimum, laying the groundwork to blame the Obama Adminstration in the future. I’m glad to see cabinet heads on the ground down there.
kay
@soonergrunt:
So was Andrea Mitchell, this afternoon.
The environmentalist wouldn’t play, though.
He said “this is all on BP”
S. cerevisiae
The magnitude of this disaster is only now sinking in, and if the wellhead goes the whole gulf is toast. I feel sick.
Bullsmith
The worst thing is Louisiana don’t need no more Katrinas of either political stripe. The serious question is how do they stop this? How much oil could this end up being?
Loon Juice
I turned Hannity on the radio this afternoon to abuse my brain and see what the dork was saying at the time. He said “this could be Obama’s Katrina” and went on to theorize that Obama was probably playing golf somewhere and that he needs to realize that being president was a full time job. He further complained that Obama took eight days to respond to this disaster.
I really wish I had a device that allowed me to override a radio show and ask a few questions without interruption. It sounded as though he was talking to Bush in a time warp.
Bob In Oregon
Come on Bobby, don’t leave us hanging… what’s the third, also, too.
Ok, so he is talking about his concerns and not the challenges, but I couldn’t resist.
Bullsmith
It really is shockingly insulting to New Orleans, and anyone with a memory and/or shred of decency, to reduce “Katrina” to any bad thing that could hurt the Prez’ poll numbers. The point was that no other President or Administration pretty much ever was as cavalier, nay hostile, to Americans suffering from a natural disaster. O’Reilly was quicker to cry “looter” than Bush was to admit that he might even be expected to react.
Nellcote
“Obama’s Katrina” has been all over cable all day. I’m ready to buy a gun and start shooting teevees.
colleeniem
@Bullsmith: @South of I-10: What a little fuck. The federal government was there almost immediately–the Coast Guard was there in hours from the beginning. He wants a solution immediately. People are thinking this is containable. It is not. It’s horrific.
GAAAAAH. On washington week w/Gwen Ifil, Karen Tumulty just asked this question.
Fuckin kill me.
colleeniem
Oh, and Washington Week, little condesending little pissants that they are, we like, well, did the Coast Guard was there, hohoho, but the cabinetmembers weren’t deployed until now.
Look, the Coast Guard is the federal agencies designed to respond to these things. They were there from the beginning.
Why do I torture myself? I shouldn’t watch t.v., it hurts my spelling
Mnemosyne
@colleeniem:
But the Coast Guard isn’t part of the government. It’s like the Army that way.
/Tweety
(not really, just me channeling)
colleeniem
@Mnemosyne: Heee.
I knew it wasn’t really you. Thanks for that, it walked me back from the ledge.
See? Proper spelling and punctuation!
Mar
You’d wish that all the politicians would stop playing the blame game and start doing whatever they can to fix it. Everyone’s asking BP to “do more” instead of saying, “do A, B, and C.”
But it’s much easier to blame somebody else than to actually do something about it.
oklahomo
Wait a minute, I thought he was having Waterloos, not Katrinas. This shit is so hard to keep up on.
Peter J
Obama doing something – socia1istic power grab.
Obama not doing something – yet another Katrina.
Repeat.
Kobie
According to MMFA, Rush Limpdick led off his “show” with this meme today.
Quiddity
I thought Obama’s Katrina was Katrina. Wasn’t he responsible for that too?
ericblair
@colleeniem:
We’re working on the system now that takes the theater ballistic missile system and incorporates Space Shuttle life support technology so we can launch cabinet members to anywhere within the continguous United States on a moment’s notice. If we have a natural disaster, a cabinet member will be launched by electronic order of the President and will hit the center of the disaster within 20 minutes with a average targeting accuracy of 50 feet. Obviously, the cabinet member will not survive this, but that’s just a minor design issue.
mclaren
Countdown to the first Republican declaration that the oil spill could have been prevented by tax cuts and deregulation in…3…2…1…
Loon Juice
@oklahomo: He’s having a “Katrinaloo.”
J.W. Hamner
@mclaren:
Perhaps if we privatized the Coast Guard this could have been avoided?
Silver Owl
Republicans will go bat shit crazy. It is just how they are wired. They are way more emo than 1000 teenagers going through an angst episode all at once.
On the upside that bastid Jindal will be seen as a lazy government leeching liberal looking for handouts and not pulling himself up by his bootstraps and taking his environmental and economic beat down like a real republican manly man.
Oh I’m waiting for the religious retards to start screaming this God’s punishment for something. LOL!
Delia
@J.W. Hamner:
Why, yes. If Obama had only put KBR in charge of the clean-up everything would be all fine and squared away by now.
D-Chance.
So when doe O-boy give the (publicly broadcasted, since he does crave that television camera) eulogy for those poor lost 11 souls from the oil rig?
oklahomo
@Loon Juice: Something tells me that by the end of his term (or terms), this word will have grown just like Islamohomofascisocia1ist has. Sooner or later he’ll have to have a Katrinaloogate moment.
AhabTRuler
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: This to the This power.
toujoursdan
@Zifnab:
Katina was the disaster it was not because it was a major hurricane. If you recall after the hurricane passed the media said “Hey it wasn’t so bad”…
Katina became “Katrina” because the maintenance of the levees was neglected for a number of years, and they couldn’t handle a hurricane that “only” unleashed Category 1 and 2 winds over the city and dumped a rather unimpressive 1′ of rain, and because Michael Brown was appointed because he was Bush’s buddy and didn’t have the leadership skills needed to mount relief. Katrina wasn’t New Orleans’ “Big One”. Not by a long shot.
Now if this doesn’t prove that right-wing ideology doesn’t work nothing will. You can’t keep cutting taxes and maintain infrastructure needed for events like this. And you can’t appoint people based solely on political connections rather than expertise.
Unabogie
As that Think Progress timeline damningly shows, it wasn’t the fact that a disaster happened on his watch. It was that we were all treated to nightly cries for help from the victims while Bush and his administration seemed positively oblivious.
It wasn’t Bush’s failure that made people mad, it was his apathy.
Allison W.
@beltane:
Exactly!!!
Jamey
I’m taking bets:
How long before the first Teabagger turns the double-play–calls this Obama’s Katrina AND says, “heckuva job, blackie!”
I
Resident Firebagger
Of course it’s disgusting that some media nitwits and right-wing d-bags absurdly label this as Obama’s Katrina.
But this narrative actually isn’t all bad for Barry Wall Street. For instance, it’s apparently made you folks forget that like three weeks ago, Obama wanted to expand off-shore drilling and was claiming that our glorious oil rigs never leaked as a result of Katrina.
You’re all so happy he’s not George Bush, you’ll overlook anything…
AhabTRuler
@Midnight Marauder: The problem is, they have tried to activate the BOP using ROVs and it won’t engage. The automatic systems didn’t engage. We don’t know if the people on the drill floor had time to try to activate the BOP. So it is not entirely clear if another switch would have helped the situation.
I am not at all convince that it is even possible to design a 100% foolproof system that can function 5000′ down. BOPs don’t function with 100% reliability in shallow water or on land, but they do have ways of controlling the spill. A mile down and limited to ROVs is a constricting state of affairs. Almost everything they will do will break untested territory, and when you throw the rulebook the window you have to be very careful that you don’t make things worse.
Of course, things could get worse all on their own, and if they do it could be worse than Katrina. 30, 000+ barrels a day for 90 days. I literally (thanks Joe) cannot conceive of the destruction if that happens.
Jamey
JW Hamner:
Or maybe we can get France to buy it back?
Yutsano
@Resident Firebagger: 2.7. It helps when trying to troll to pay attention to what’s already been discussed here.
kay
Not to throw media off their game, but…
Hurricanes are naturally occurring events. Oil rigs with malfunctioning emergency shut off valves are not.
It seems to me that blaming Obama, while endlessly attractive to conservatives/media types, lets BP completely dodge responsibility, and that is unlike Katrina, where we couldn’t very well look to the hurricane to accept responsibility.
“Inadequate response” doesn’t really cover it. They have and had no plan B for shutting this thing off. They’re asking other oil companies to send engineers with ideas, so that’s wonderful. Forget “response”. Would that BP had solicited those “ideas” when they put the thing together.
handy
@Resident Firebagger:
Must be a slow Friday night in the Cole/DougJ house.
Yutsano
@handy: I’m honestly disappointed with the trollery as of late. Not that I want to bring BoB back, but it is getting a bit tiresome.
debbie
It probably won’t stop them, but they ought to realize that if they label the spill “Obama’s Katrina,” then they’ll have to accept that it was Bush’s 9/11.
neill
helene cooper of the new york fucking times scores!
rapido
does anyone get where the second half of the headline came from anyway?
The Times says “yet a review of the response suggests it may be too simplistic to place all the blame for the unfolding environmental catastrophe on the oil company. The federal government also had opportunities to move more quickly, but did not do so while it waited for a resolution to the spreading spill from BP”
it’s like they’re actually generating an analysis or opinion of the events instead of a some say this and some say that kind of article. would have been nice in the previous administration.
Loon Juice
@oklahomo: How about “This is certainly Obama’s MoniKatrinaloogate!!”
Or is the Lewinsky reference too obscure…..
Svensker
@D-Chance.:
You know, that is a really shitty comment.
Steeplejack
@Mike G:
Win, win win!