Oil slick: if you thought they were incompetent yesterday…

Yet another beauty from the Keystone Kops Obama Administration. So far, we’ve learned that the administration and the agencies it supervises have moved, if at all, at a snail’s pace regarding the offer of a Maine businessman to supply them with roughly eight miles of containment boom per day. Now, per Loren Steffy of the Houston Chronicle, we have yet another example of how the Greatest Administration Ever couldn’t find it’s rear end with both hands and a flashlight:

U.S. and BP slow to accept Dutch expertise

Three days after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch government offered to help.

It was willing to provide ships outfitted with oil-skimming booms, and it proposed a plan for building sand barriers to protect sensitive marshlands.

The response from the Obama administration and BP, which are coordinating the cleanup: “The embassy got a nice letter from the administration that said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’” said Geert Visser, consul general for the Netherlands in Houston.

Now, almost seven weeks later, as the oil spewing from the battered well spreads across the Gulf and soils pristine beaches and coastline, BP and our government have reconsidered.

Oh, well, that’s just dandy! Only a month-and-a-half after being offered help from experts in this kind of crisis, the government and BP finally get around to saying “Yeah, okay. Might be a good idea.”

Call me parochial and lacking in nuance, but, isn’t it better to have more resources on hand to fix a problem than not to have what you need? Do you wait to go the store for a hammer to fix the hole in the roof until it collapses during a downpour? When your neighbor offers to help put out a fire on your property, don’t you say “yes, thanks?”

Hell yes you do!

Oh, and they were even willing to build Governor Jindal his sand berms – the ones the Interior Department couldn’t make up their minds about.

WTF? I ask again, W.T.F.??

Does anyone in the White House or BP know what they’re doing?

(via Hot Air)

Gulf oil slick: mindboggling incompetence

When an oil spill occurs in water, one thing you want a lot of is boom: floating barriers that can contain the oil to a relatively restricted area. Since the Deepwater Horizon exploded and began the largest oil spill in US history, gulf-state governors have been begging for boom to protect their coastlines. Louisiana Governor Jindal asked for 5,000,000 feet of “hard” boom in early may. So far, he’s only received 20% of that. Supposedly, there just isn’t enough.

Wrong.

In what has got to be one of the most frustrating, infuriating moments of bureaucratic foot-dragging and incompetence since this whole mess began, a company in Maine has miles of boom available. They can churn out 40,000 feet per day, they’ve contacted federal officials and executives at BP – and no one will buy it from them:

John Lapoint of Packgen in Auburn, Maine, says he’s got plenty of floating oil containment boom and can make lots more on short notice. There’s just one problem: no one will buy it from him.

(…)

Packgen’s main business is not making oil boom. They make specialty packaging materials for shipping and storing environmentally sensitive materials. But when Packgen’s president, John Lapoint, saw the BP oil spill in the news, he understood right away that to have any hope of containing the oil drifting towards the shoreline, lots of floating boom would be necessary.

(…)

Maine, like the rest of the country, is suffering from very high unemployment. But its residents aren’t out of work because they aren’t useful; they’re useful, but out of work because there’s nothing much useful to do. Lapoint was able to immediately add two shifts of competent and motivated workers, and by the fourth day of production was making forty thousand feet of boom a day.

It’s likely they could make even more. But no one was ready to purchase it.

This comes down to a failure of anyone other than Mr. Lapoint, from the President of the United States to BP executives, to take any initiative. Instead they’ve stuck to approved procedures: when the Governor of Louisiana wants to build sand berms to protect his marshes, he has to wait for approval from Washington because of environmental regulations. And when a company stands ready to do its part and work round the clock to supply the equipment we need, no one from the Fed can be moved to do anything, while BP sniffs because the design isn’t approved, yet.

This is the worst of all possible situations: a Federal government that makes everyone wait on it, depend on it – and then won’t act decisively in a situation where it is given the lead role by law.

All while the ecologies and economies of the Gulf states are devastated.

Here we have Americans willing to take the initiative, from the Jindal administration to a small company in Maine, and the statist nitwits in DC are blocking them every step of the way. They should have instead have said “damn the regulations” and bought every foot of boom Packgen had, shipped by military airlift to the Gulf, and then set the company to working 24 hours a day. If the President is so willing to “kick ass,” here is just the situation in which he should put boot to tail. This is disgraceful.

Apparently, there are two clean ups in order: first the Gulf, and then Washington, D.C. 

LINKS: More at Hot Air.

Worst candidate ever? Check.

Really, I thought the Democrats had hit bottom with John Kerry in 2004, but that was until I’d discovered Martha Coakley, heir to Democratic nominee for Ted Kennedy’s throne the US Senate from Massachusetts. Let’s review, shall we?

• Act as if the seat is already yours? Check.
• Claim that the terrorists have all left Afghanistan days after a terrorist kills several CIA agents… in Afghanistan? Check.
• Refuse to meet the voters and insult a beloved state landmark? Check.
• Tell Catholics they shouldn’t work in emergency rooms because of their religion? In a heavily Catholic state? Check.

And, for the cherry on the sundae, trust your advertising to allies who think it’s a great idea to attack your opponent as a lackey of Wall Street in an ad using an image of the World Trade Center as the background.

I really thought Scott Brown had no chance, and Coakley may still win the election, but she may be accomplishing what was once thought to be impossible: handing a Senate seat –the one held by Ted Kennedy, no less– to a Republican in Deep Blue Massachusetts, which in turn would spell almost certain death for Kennedy’s beloved nationalized health care.

Is it possible she’s a deep-cover agent for Karl Rove? Or is she really this miserable a candidate?

ADDENDUM: Speaking of Kerry, the Democrats missed a chance in 2008 to surpass his ineptitude by failing to nominate his 2004 running-mate, John Edwards. I guarantee you, he would have been a total train wreck.

UPDATE: The hits keep coming: Rip off a corporate trademark and earn yourself a cease and desist letter? And you’re the state’s chief law-enforcement officer? Check.