NEW ORLEANS -- Now that the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history has effectively been stopped, the White House is considering an early end to its moratorium on deepwater drilling.
But four months after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, regulators have only started to make good on promises to overhaul drilling. Tough measures are stalled in Congress. A $1 billion emergency response network proposed by the industry won't be operational for another year.
And while doomsday scenarios from the BP spill, like oil washing up the East Coast, have not come to pass, there are no guarantees that drilling will be any safer once it does resume.
What's changed is "not enough to make a big difference," said Charles Perrow, a Yale professor who has studied the spill in the Gulf...
Yes, I'd take my daughters for a swim in the Gulf too, if I had a cadre of secret service agents and Party loyalists to scope out the safest, cleanest spot available. And clean the oil off my baby's feet afterwards. All at the taxpayer's expense, of course.
Meanwhile, IOZ has heard quite enough.
...Recently, a liberal friend of mine lamented the stigmata of poor martyr, LBJ. "It's a shame," she said, "that all anyone remembers is Vietnam." I was a bit agog. She said something about "domestic programs." It's the classic Mussolini defense. Well, he made the trains run on time. It is both gloriously untrue on the factual merits and colossally morally obtuse. I suggested to her that the shame is quite the opposite: that some lingering and mostly false sense that the old hound dog did something good for the station of black folk in America fudges a fair accounting of just what a monster he was.
...In addition to pimping for wars to be conducted more responsibly with a more frugal allocation of resources, as if the wholesale killing of innocents were analogous to the zero-based budgeting process for your half-mil-a-year, save-the-children 501(c)3, they persistently approach the American death machine as an unfortunate distraction. Oh, isn't it a shame that Obama has to kill dozens of Yemeni civilians for no reason at all whatsoever when he should be fighting to save Social Security. Isn't it too bad that he's got to worry about his escalating Asian land war when America is going dark. How will it affect his legacy? We report, you decide.
If Mistress History offers consolation, it is that Obama will not be remembered for "saving" GM, bailing out Wall Street, or "historically" mandating that Americans not currently covered by their employers' piece-of-shit healthcare plans purchase piece-of-shit healthcare plans of their own, but rather for all the bombing and killing, the publicly acknowledged and publicly undenied wars that he's fighting. Not that this consolation counts for much to the dead and their families, and not that it will in any way constrain future asshole presidents from killing the fuck out of everyone on earth, so long as they are still able, but at very least, forty years hence, liberal dickheads can lament that Barry O. is remembered mostly for killing the fuck out of people, his half-assed efforts to put people to work through six-month highway construction gigs long since laughed off and forgotten.
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