“Here’s my report on that and guess what it’s not going to take six months and almost 400 pages to say what I have to say.”

“The idea that there were not plenty of legitimate reasons for people in the gulf to be upset about the response to the spill is just ludicrous it’s rewriting history.”

(more…)

Some of the same members of the media, who once sold us on the idea of President Obama being a post racial and post partisan President more than two years ago, are demanding that he gets tougher with his political opponents or in their words, “act black” in order to save his presidency.

The left is now embittered because the card house that is Obama has crashed in upon itself, leaving him no other choice, but to comprise with congressional republicans in order to avoid gridlock and move forward on his agenda.

Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and others are demanding that he get tough and refuse to work with congressional Republicans after the American public soured on the direction of the nation under his Presidency along with a Democratic Congress. Bill Maher wants to see the CEOs of major corporations such as BP bullied into subjugation by Obama and quoted as saying at the height of the Gulf oil spill, “That Obama needed to start acting black” by calling in the head of BP into the Oval Office and brandishing a pistol and swearing at him in order to speed up the pace of the cleanup efforts.

(more…)

I don’t regularly watch MSNBC, but curiosity got the better of me tonight. For no special reason, I found myself wondering what THE Place for Politics—I can’t bring myself to use the network’s new slogan—would say about the midterm elections the day after. So I tuned into The Rachel Maddow Show.

Let me first acknowledge that the puckish Ms. Maddow is has a certain insouciant charisma and seems quite comfortable on air–a natural.

Nevertheless, by the end of the hour, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the lass. If tonight’s menu is representative of the content and style of Maddow’s eponymous program, it was disappointing to see her obvious talent wasted on the wholesaling of bitter schadenfreude and age-old class-warfare.

Why do I say this?

In the show’s first segment, while positing that the newly House-dominant Republican party would be unwilling to compromise with President Obama on anything (a curious prejudgment), Maddow managed to work the recent BP oil spill into her monologue, ostensibly referring to inevitable upcoming House-Senate negotiations on energy legislation. (more…)

From the Associated Press:

The federal government hired a New Orleans man for $18,000 to appraise whether news stories about its actions in the Gulf oil spill were positive or negative for the Obama administration, which was keenly sensitive to comparisons between its response and former President George W. Bush’s much-maligned reaction to Hurricane Katrina.

The government also spent $10,000 for just over three minutes of video showing a routine offshore rig inspection for news organizations but couldn’t say whether any ran the footage. And it awarded a $216,625 no-bid contract for a survey of seabirds to an environmental group that has criticized what it calls the “extreme anti-conservation record” of Sarah Palin, a possible 2012 rival to President Barack Obama.

The contracts were among hundreds reviewed by The Associated Press as the government begins to provide an early glimpse at federal spending since the Gulf disaster in April. While most of the contracts don’t raise alarms, some could provide ammunition for critics of government waste. (more…)

Newspapers and television stations reaped a financial windfall from the BP oil spill — and continue to benefit as the company spends millions on advertising to repair its battered image following the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.

BP spent $93.4 million on ads between April 1 and July 31, according to Politico. That’s triple the amount from the same period one year ago. The information was included in a letter from House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Fla.) to Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.).

BP began its flurry of ads shortly after the Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20 and has continued to target national and local outlets seven weeks after the well was capped. Newspapers and TV stations have been the biggest beneficiaries. (more…)

It’s hard not to feel sorry for Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift. She’s like the unlucky girl who keeps trying oh-so-hard but never makes the cheerleading squad. In column after column Clift seems to be angling for some future sinecure in the Obama administration a la Jay Carney, who left Time to work as communications director for Joe “Big F—ing Deal” Biden. But so far, no luck.

How else to explain this woman’s latest effort in sis-boom-bah journalism? Like a good little cheerleader, Clift flings her pom-poms in an acrobatic effort to distract from the real issue—Obama’s woeful handling of the Gulf catastrophe—with a gratuitous attack on the Tea Party, Dick Armey, and defenders of the Constitution in general.

What Would the Tea Party Do?

They object to Obama. Fine—but it’s worth asking how they would handle something like the gulf oil spill.

In actuality, no, it’s not worth asking what the Tea Party would do. The Tea Party is a movement, not a person. But in light of the fact that the average Tea Party candidate running in any of the various races around the country has more practical business experience than President Obama—who has none—smart money would take the odds on the Tea Party candidate versus the Community Organizer any day—even on an oil-slippery track.

After her opening move, Clift flashes her brightest Obama smile: (more…)

The childish, feminized fantasy world in which the left dwells was never more in evidence than in this lunatic rant by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, in which the Rhodes Scholar plays president for a few minutes and gives the speech she wishes Obama had given the other night.

It’s a speech that basically boils down to an uniformed, juvenile cri de coeur against BP, filled with the “shoulds” and “woulds” the left habitually uses in demanding that mommy and daddy protect them from things that go bump in the night. As usual, there’s not a single thought devoted to practicalities, alternatives or the larger issues of why and how, just the standard search for a villain and the demand for punishment. What a desperately miserable world these people live in; no wonder they’re all nuts.

“Enjoy:”

If you want to know why the Republicans are called the “stupid party,” you need to look no further than this story about John Boehner’s distancing himself from Congressman Joe Barton’s remark that, based on no constitutional authority, BP had been “shaken down” by the Obama administration and forced to fork over a $20 billion “slush fund.”

First, please take a look at Barton’s comments:

A relatively mild statement of fact, expressed inoffensively. So naturally, the spineless jellyfish who pass for the “leaders” of the Stupid Party immediately started backpedaling away:

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) broke with a top Republican on Thursday who suggested BP had suffered a “shakedown” by being forced to set up a $20 billion fund to pay out damages.

Asked at his weekly press conference if he disagreed with Barton’s characterization of the deal struck Wednesday at the White House, Boehner quickly responded, “I do.”

“BP agreed to fund the cost of this cleanup from the beginning and I’m glad they’re being held accountable,” Boehner told reporters.

When is the Stupid Party going to wise up and realize that the only way fight Obamaism is by going on the attack, by using the weapons of the left against them — relentlessness, implacable opposition and a ruthless willingness to pick up beer bottles and paving stones and pool cues if it will help win the fight. The left never compromises unless it has to, never apologizes unless it is forced to and never cedes an inch of ground that it is not wrested from it in intellectual combat. (more…)

In his June 8, 2010, 7,000-plus word Rolling Stone article entitled “The Spill, The Scandal, and the President,” Tim Dickinson fixed blame for the oil leak in the Gulf, but ignored how the effort to fix the mess it’s causing has been badly mismanaged. In that sense, he hit his intended targets, but missed the mark.

The subtitle of the piece identifies his targets.

The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world’s most dangerous oil company get away with murder.

The storyline is simple. A notoriously negligent oil company, British Petroleum (BP), plus a corrupt Minerals Management Services (MMS) inherited from Bush, equals The Spill. It’s a variation on the “It’s Bush’s Fault” motif.

Even a Republican Congressman piled on:

It’s tempting to believe that the Gulf spill, like so many disasters inherited by Obama, was the fault of the Texas oilman who preceded him in office. But, though George W. Bush paved the way for the catastrophe, it was Obama who gave BP the green light to drill. “Bush owns eight years of the mess,” says Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican from California. “But after more than a year on the job, Salazar owns it too.”

(more…)

Carpe BP?  – That seems to be a theme heard all across the MSM when it comes to what should be done with British Petroleum.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has called for the temporary takeover of the oil giant – at least until we have the situation under control.  Could you have a vaguer timeline, Mr. Reich?  “Under control” means a lot of things to a lot of people.  Some folks in Alaska believe that the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound is not yet under control.

And then we have the great global wisdom of satellite radio star Rosie O’Donnell who told her audience that she didn’t care if you “call it socialism, call it communism, call it anything you want” but she wanted BP’s assets seized by the government: (more…)

Has the liberal media started rushing the exits in an effort to escape from Camp Obama?  I believe this to be true.  But don’t take my word for it — let’s examine the evidence.

It may have all started with James Carville.  Last week, Carville was on CNN with Anderson Cooper , flipping out about the administration’s response to the BP spill.  Not long after that Carville took his frothy charges of “political stupidity” to ABC, making some strong accusations about the lack of leadership and competence coming from the big office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Perhaps James Carville?s rabid rants were also a signal to the formerly faithful members of the press that vacation time was over and real reporting and journalism was going to be back in fashion.

On June 1, Maureen Dowd of the financially troubled, yet still venerated New York Times, wrote a op-ed piece that wondered if “Yes we can” has been downgraded to “Will we ever?”  She later proclaimed, “The oil won’t stop flowing, but the magic has.” (more…)

In case you’ve been in a coma over the last few weeks, we’ve had a bit of problem on the Gulf Coast. While the oil leak that developed after the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up is indeed a disaster, this tragic event is unprecedented and its causes complex. As is usually the case when it comes to a complex issues, the MSM has spent a lot of time finger-pointing without much of an idea what they’re pointing at.

For example, a May 6 AP story entitled “Feds let BP avoid filing blowout plan for Gulf rig” featured this lede:

Petrochemical giant BP didn’t file a plan to specifically handle a major oil spill from an uncontrolled blowout at its Deepwater Horizon project because the federal agency that regulates offshore rigs changed its rules two years ago to exempt certain projects in the central Gulf region, according to an Associated Press review of official records.

Sounds ominous, and while those carefully chosen words are perhaps technically true, they are also meaningless. (more…)