Currently viewing the tag: “Ignored”
In yet another twist in the controversy in Wisconsin swirling around Gov. Scott Walker’s bill that would deep-six collective bargaining for public unions, the legislation was published — ignoring a court restraining order. This is likely to further arouse passions and polarize Wisconsin as well as other parts of the country where labor unions are under being challenged by GOP governors:
In a stunning twist, controversial legislation limiting collective bargaining for public workers was published on Friday despite a judge’s hold on the measure, sparking a dispute over whether it takes effect Saturday.
The legislation was published Friday to the Legislature’s website with a footnote that acknowledges the restraining order by a Dane County judge. But the posting says state law “requires the Legislative Reference Bureau to publish every act within 10 working days after its date of enactment.”
The measure sparked massive protests at the Capitol and lawsuits by opponents because it would eliminate the ability of most public workers to bargain over anything but wages.
The restraining order was issued against Democratic Secretary of State Doug La Follette. But the bill was published by the reference bureau, which was not named in the restraining order.
This is basically “ends justify the means” politics: using a loophole.
Laws normally take effect a day after they are published, and a top GOP lawmaker said that meant it will become law Saturday. But the nonpartisan legislative official who published the law disagreed.
“I think this is a ministerial act that forwards it to the secretary of state,” said Stephen Miller, director of the Legislative Reference Bureau. “I don’t think this act makes it become effective. My understanding is that the secretary of state has to publish it in the (official state) newspaper for it to become effective.”
Prediction: Walker will insist it is now valid and implement it where he can.
Walker signed the bill March 11. Under state law, it must be published within 10 working days, which was Friday.The law has not been printed in the Wisconsin State Journal, the official state newspaper, as other laws are. Late Friday, State Journal publisher Bill Johnston said in an email that the notice for the law had been scheduled to run but had been canceled. He did not elaborate.
Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) claimed it didn’t matter that it hasn’t appeared in the paper.
“It’s published,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s law. That’s what I contend.”
The question is: how will independent voters react to this? Polls have shown that in Wisconsin and elsewhere Walker’s actions are not winning the argument. This move, at first blush, at least, seems a “whatever it takes” on this issue. But the problem for Walker and the GOP is that many Americans have clearly now concluded that it isn’t just the budget at play in Wisconsin and other states where Republican governors are slicing away rights that were considered a “given” in American life. There is an ineffable aroma of power politics — partially ideology and part an effort to remove a group that has traditionally supported Democrats, in the believe it’d hurt the Dems in 2012.
However you can now predict this: Wisconsin is likely to rally unions and many union members more than ever to the Democratic party and rally the party’s base, even if they are not totally pleased with Barack Obama.
A CROSS SECTION OF VIEWPOINTS ON THIS ISSUE
–Firedog Lake:
We still don’t know if the state Supreme Court will take up the restraining order on the bill, which has been appealed by the state Attorney General. But the Walker Administration is acting like the restraining order didn’t exist.
The level of contempt for the law is astounding to me…
…Of course, the point is not necessarily whether the Secretary of State has the sole power to publish law – that looks clear to me. It’s whether the Walker Administration THINKS the bill is now published and law that’s the problem, and what will be the remedy for that.
….Democrats are surely on their way back to court even as you’re reading this to demand that the TRO be expanded to cover the LRB, Walker, the legislature, and everyone else under the sun. The judge did, after all, enjoin “further implementation” of the law generally before specifying a particular actor, so they’ll probably win and the scope of the order will be enlarged. In fact, according to the Journal-Sentinel story quoted above, there’s already a new court action pending that challenges the collective bargaining law on some sort of equal protection grounds (treating one group of workers differently from another by limiting their CB privileges) and argues that the state GOP should have needed a three-fifths quorum to pass it instead of the simple majority quorum they used. Nothing should change here, in other words, and since the state supreme court is probably going to deal with this sooner rather than later, even if the law is implemented immediately its ultimate fate should be decided in a few days anyway.
Good grief.
The law is being followed: State law “requires the Legislative Reference Bureau to publish every act within 10 working days after its date of enactment..
Writing for the FuelFix Blog, William O’Keefe gives us the Top 9 Energy Facts Ignored by Federal Policy.
Here are four of them. Click here for the rest of the list.
- Fossil energy (coal, oil, and gas) will continue to fuel the U.S. and the rest of the world for at least the next several decades, according to IEA and EIA.
- Americans’ economy and lifestyle are based on mobility, and mobility depends on reliable, affordable fuel.
- No abundant, commercially competitive alternatives to liquid fuels — gasoline and diesel — yet exist.
- The potential of biofuels as an alternative to gasoline depends on advances in cellulosic technology, which experts don’t expect anytime soon.
Technorati tags: 
Obama Barack Obama politics economy Drill here, drill now government energy oil
One year ago today President Barack Obama signed into law government controlled health care. It was a punch in the gut to a majority of Americans who had passionately pleaded that this legislation be thrown in the dumpster. How many times did millions of people travel to Washington D.C., call and email our congressman, or attend Town Hall meetings and demand they, “kill the bill?”
We were readily dismissed and slandered by the Democrats in Congress; accused of being astro-turf and even racists. This diversionary tactic was cleverly employed to conceal the fact that Congress was, through calculation and deceit, forcefully imposing their ultra-liberal agenda on the American people.
Let’s make no mistake about it. This is socialized medicine that will cost us trillions of dollars that we DO NOT HAVE, but don’t worry…we will print the money to cover the bill. Even better, Congress and the President have decided your liberty means very little to them if it means more control for Washington, so the IRS will now force you to enter into an insurance contract against your will.
When was the last time we had 28 states suing the federal government? When was the last time you had a million people take to the streets in opposition to the actions of Congress? When was the last time we saw such a sweeping sea-change in a congressional election cycle? We are beyond angry. We want the insanity to stop in Washington D.C.
So what are the next steps as we mourn this one year anniversary? The House passed a bill to repeal Obamacare, but little else has been done. It is now time to play hardball. No more continuing resolutions, no more contemplation of raising the debt ceiling, no more token $ 6 billion cuts. Let’s repeal this direct offense to our liberty and make President Obama veto it. Next, let’s defund and gut this legislation. I don’t want lame excuses for no action and I could care less about all the gamesmanship.
The tea party grassroots has had a tremendous impact on our political landscape. We made huge strides this past November. But our work is not done yet. If we are serious about abolishing Obamacare, then we must elect constitutional candidates to the U.S. Senate that have the grit and the fire to go to the wall. I can promise you all one thing: I have stood in the cold, attended rallies, emailed, called, blogged, spent thousands of dollars of my own money, and dragged my kids all over Virginia in an effort to destroy this cancer on our freedom…and if elected as the next U.S. Senator from Virginia, I will do everything in my power to repeal, defund and kill government controlled health care. But it will only happen if the tea party stays involved and influences elections all over the country. Will you join me?
Legacies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Ignored
Image via Wikipedia The mushroom cloud over Nagasaki following the explosion of the Atom Bomb dropped August 9th 1945.
The Atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945 did nothing but bad. The war was over anyway and the Japanese would have surrendered without testing the bombs. Nevertheless America unleashed its new weapons and the deaths, immediate and long term suffering happened. If the evidence had led to Japan developing green fuels and boycotting nuclear development perhaps some of the suffering would have been offset.
Japanese Nuclear Industry
However, despite the suffering and the ruination of its society and economy by A bombs in 1945 Japan embraced nuclear technology. Japan built state of the art nuclear power stations. These were built against the wishes of a considerable anti-nuclear group. This group dared to think the unthinkable including the consequences of terrorism and natural disasters. They predicted this would happen.
Fukushima Daiichi’s Reactor 3
The world will be harmed if this reactor is not contained. It was wrong for the Japanese to build nuclear stations in an area which is prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. Nuclear power is not worth the risks no matter who develops it.
A U.S. President beset by angry mobs screaming “Yankee Imperialist Go Home”, exploding Molotov cocktails, rubber bullets, tear gas, riot police.
El Comandante Che Guevara
In 2007 the MSNBC headline screamed “Protests greet Bush upon arrival in Brazil” and The Guardian one-upped it with “Angry crowds hunt Bush as protests mark start of Latin America tour”. Fast forward to 2011 as another U.S. President faces identical protests and riots. Funny thing, though, this time there is absolute stone cold silence on these protests and riots from the New York Times, CNN, AP, YahooNews, MSNBC, The Guardian, etc. (Politico to its credit reports it).
Sporting Che Guevera T-Shirts, radical leftist protestors “associated with the Socialist Workers Party, PSTU,” launched Molotov cocktails in front of the U.S. consulate to protest President Obama’s arrival in Rio. Military police fired rubber bullets at the crowd, using tear gas and billy clubs to chase away the violent, socialist and oh-so-intolerant protesters. It seems the Left is never satisfied. What’s a radical left-wing president to do?
What is most ironic about the Brazil protests is that the PSTU is a hard core socialist party in Brazil. While anti-Obama protests in the US consider Obama a socialist, the socialists in Brazil consider him a yankee capitalist, the bane of the Latin American left … PSTU says the protest is to bring “American imperialism” to the attention of the millions of Brazilians …
Hmmm. Could this be why the President “cancelled a public speech he was scheduled to deliver Sunday” in an “historic plaza” in the “heart of Rio de Janeiro?” Well, we may never know from most in the Make-Believe Media. Yahoo News and New York Times are too busy breathlessly praising Obama as the guru of Hoops citing his so-far superb basketball bracket noting that even women’s hoopsters have attracted Obama’s laser-like focus, promoting my new moniker for our Bookie-In-Chief: “Bracket Hoops” Obama.
Meanwhile, the NY Daily News staunchly defended Obama’s trip to Rio as a business trip, blasting conservatives who questioned Obama’s timing and point to his choice to bring the missus, kids, grammy and godmother along as proof that this is really a Spring Break vacation.
But cooing over The Guru of Hoops just isn’t enough. The MBM finds itself increasingly acting as traffic cops detouring folks around gory news scenes they don’t want you to see, kinda like 21st Century Clinton bimbo suppression squads. So with Rio street riots, the MBM adopts a need-to-know approach that otherwise might put an embarrassing socialist peccadillo on the face of oil-rich Brazil, thereby hurting Obama’s oil-begging tour in Rio. It’s embarrassing enough that the oil-rich US is already lagging behind China’s lead on the matter.
What a difference four years make.
Now, we trust every man, woman, and child in America will forever remember where they were yesterday when word came of Charlie Sheen’s firing. It was top news even outside of the U.S. media.
Meanwhile, Copts in Egypt entered into a second day of protests (according to Reuters) after the massive, savage attack on a church by thousands of Muslims shouting “Allahu akbar,” over a relationship between a Muslim woman and a Christian man. They protested in front of the state television building, where heaven knows if they had any chance of being seen by people with cameras, it would be there.
Predictably, the Western mainstream media has been virtually silent on Christian protests in Egypt. Acknowledging them — acknowledging the systematic, centuries-old victimization of the Christian minority at the hands of the Muslim majority — would upset the accepted, tidy, storybook narrative of an Egyptian revolution built on interfaith cooperation. It would tarnish a feel-good story out of the Muslim world, and the media are loath to let that pearl of great price roll away.
“Egypt’s prime minister meets Christian protesters,” by Ahmed Aleiba for Reuters, March 7:
Prime Minister Essam Sharaf joined some 1,000 Christian protesters on Monday evening, who welcomed him but refused to talk to him before the Helwan governor resigns.
Egyptian Christians protested on Monday after a church was set on fire on the outskirts of Cairo, the latest sectarian flare-up in a country already facing political turmoil.
The army vowed to rebuild the church before Easter holidays, but the protestors say the governor of Helwan (south of Cairo) refuses to rebuild the church in its original location, and suggests another site outside the village.
Christians oppose this suggestion.
“We demand the resignation of Helwan governor,” said one of the protestors gathered in front of the state TV building.
Some Muslims also joined the crowd who gathered outside the state television building in central Cairo. Banners called for a unified law for worship buildings. Protestors say they won’t leave before our demands are met.
Witnesses and a security source said the church in Helwan was torched after a row sparked by a romantic relationship between a Christian man and a Muslim woman.
Christians say many muslims saved and protected priests when the blaze was started. “But there were others, some unknown, who attacked the Muslims who rescued the Church clerks.” [clerics?]
In the original story, a priest and three deacons remained unaccounted for. Updates since then have not mentioned them.
But a new organization promises to be a real watchdog.
American Thinker Blog
But a new organization promises to be a real watchdog.
American Thinker Blog
Hundreds of people have contacted the law firm and military advocacy group associated with a federal lawsuit which accuses the Pentagon of not doing enough to prevent the rape and sexual harassment of members of the Armed Services.
“Our phones have been ringing off the hook for the last week,” Anuradha Bhagwati, executive director of Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN), told TPM in an interview this week. “I feel like it’s the first time literally in military history where survivors have had a strong sense of institutional support — and by institutional I mean a legitimate law firm and advocacy organization supporting the cause.”
Many of those who have reached out to SWAN and the law firm of civil litigator Susan Burke — including survivors, family members of victims and witnesses of rape or sexual harassment — have expressed interest in joining the suit.
Bhagwati said that the law firm was preparing a second round of plaintiffs. “I don’t know how many rounds they’ll end up doing. I think it’s part of a long term strategy to keep media attention alive, to keep this in the public, the limelight.”
Bhagwati said they were getting calls from current and former of all ages — from those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan to much older veterans — “coming out of the woodwork” about their experiences with rape or sexual harassment in the military.
The suit filed last week chronicles several allegations of sexual assaults that military leadership allegedly dismissed or tried to cover up both in the U.S. and abroad.
“Unfortunately, the military has been dealing with this issue for decades. Survivors have come and gone, most of them are still sort of languishing in their betrayal and PTSD,” Bhagwati said.
She said there is no indication that rape is on the rise, but said that reporting mechanisms are better known within the military.
One of the problems with how the military handles rape and sexual harassment is that it focuses on victims services after the fact and not active prevention or attempts to change the culture, said Bhagwati.
But Bhagwati says the suit and the attention it has brought to the issue are a step in the right direction.
“This last week is more than survivors could have ever dreamed of,” Bhagwati said. “Justice is a funny thing.”
Somewhere in the bowels of the MSNBC newsroom, a decision was made today to devote considerable coverage to getting to the bottom of a disconcerting juvenile epidemic: car surfing.
That's right, the "fearless gamble" that is "all the rage" among American teenagers, according to NBC News correspondent Kerry Sanders, is an important enough story for a national cable news network to send one of its intrepid reporters to give live reports throughout the morning and into the mid-afternoon.
While the topic of car surfing received substantial coverage on "Jansing & Co." with Chris Jansing, "News Live" with Contessa Brewer, and "News Nation" with Tamron Hall, the recent sting operation that uncovered employees at a New York City Planned Parenthood office offering advice to a man posing as a pimp who admitted to exploiting minors as sex slaves received but a scant 30-second news brief during the 10 a.m. hour of "Jansing & Co."
"I've never heard of this before," confessed Jansing. "What exactly is car surfing?"
Sanders, reporting live while driving himself in circles around a parking lot in Florida, explained to Jansing that car surfing is "dangerous," "illegal," and "obscure," but that throngs of teens are dying in pursuit of this "fearless gamble."
All death is tragic, but let's put MSNBC's abundance of car-surfing coverage and dearth of human-trafficking coverage into perspective. According to a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control, which Sanders cited in his report, there were a total of 99 cases of car-surfing injuries identified in American newspapers from 1990 to 2008. On the other hand, the 2006 US Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report estimated that 14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked in the United States annually.
Instead of covering a tragedy that afflicts thousands of people each year, MSNBC opted to investigate an "obscure" fools' errand that hasn't harmed 100 people in the past 20 years.
"Is it okay to drive and do TV at the same time?" asked a smirking Jansing.
Perhaps a more appropriate question to ask would be: is it okay for a national news correspondent to be giving live reports behind the wheel of a moving vehicle on a story about teens doing stupid things with moving vehicles, at the expense of investigating allegations that a nationally-renowned abortion clinic is complicit in helping people who admit to selling minors for sex?
A transcript of Chris Jansing's news brief on the Planned Parenthood scandal can be found below:
MSNBC
Jansing & Co.
February 8, 2011
10:14 a.m. EST
An anti-abortion group called Live Action says its undercover cameras caught big problems at a New York City Planned Parenthood office. The man in it poses as a pimp and asks for help for underage sex workers. Live Action insists the video shows that employees at Planned Parenthood are willing to help people who sexually exploit minors. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America said it will retrain its employees on how to deal with situations like this.
-Alex Fitzsimmons is a News Analysis intern at the Media Research Center. Click here to follow him on Twitter.
-By Warner Todd Huston
As Superbowl XLV began a video celebrating the life of Ronald Reagan was played on the jumbo tron screen in the stadium for the sports fans there to enjoy. It was only fitting seeing as how the game was being played on Reagan’s 100th birthday. But the national audiences were never made […]
Publius Forum
The report by Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins is a departure from the scrambling by the mainstream media and politicians to avoid any mention of Islam or jihad. This document at least calls attention to the role of “homegrown Islamic extremism,” unlike a New York Times report that insisted Hasan’s and his motive “remain an enigma.”
Army officials “valued the diversity of having a Muslim psychiatrist,” but Nidal Malik Hasan could only have broadcast his intentions more clearly if he wore a blinking, green neon sign over his head that said “I’m going to kill you.” He more or less did just that with his now infamous PowerPoint presentation which discussed jihadist doctrine at length and openly declared: “We [Muslims] love death more than you love life.”
For now, the report recommends that the Pentagon “revise its policies and training in order to confront the threat of Islamist extremism directly.” But even short of tackling chapter and verse, any such activity will be met with howls of “profiling” and “Islamophobia,” and resisted by Muslim sympathizers setting policies within the Pentagon.
The price of continued inaction and half-measures may be another massacre. “Report: FBI, Army failures preceded Fort Hood massacre,” by Charley Keys and Alan Silverleib for CNN, February 3:
Washington (CNN) — FBI and Army officials repeatedly ignored multiple warning signs that could have prevented the November 2009 massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, according to a long-awaited report released Thursday by two U.S. senators.
The inability to act was a result of both bureaucratic inefficiency and an unwillingness to identify and confront homegrown Islamic extremism, the report concludes.
Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan is accused in the shootings, which left 13 people dead and 32 wounded. He faces a likely court-martial and potential death penalty.
Thursday’s report — titled “A Ticking Time Bomb” — was written by Sens. Joseph Lieberman, I-Connecticut, and Susan Collins, R-Maine. Lieberman is the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee; Collins is the committee’s top Republican.
“Although neither the Department of Defense nor the FBI had specific information concerning the time, place, or nature of the attack, they collectively had sufficient information to have detected Hasan’s radicalization to violent Islamist extremism but failed both to understand and to act on it,” the report says.
“Our investigation found specific and systemic failures in the government’s handling of the Hasan case and raises additional concerns about what may be broader systemic issues.”
Among other things, the report notes that a FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force had learned that Hasan was communicating with a suspected terrorist and flagged his communications for “further review.” A second task force, however, subsequently dismissed the evidence and “dropped the matter rather than cause a bureaucratic confrontation.”
Hasan reportedly communicated by e-mail with radical Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki’s name is not included in the publicly released version of the report.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon “possessed compelling evidence that Hasan embraced views so extreme that it should have disciplined him or discharged him from the military, but (Defense officials) failed to take action against him,” the report says.
Damning:
It concludes that Hasan’s military officer evaluation reports were “sanitized” to minimize his “obsession with violent Islamic extremism.”
“It is clear from this failure that (the Pentagon) lacks (an) institutional culture … sufficient to inform commanders and all levels of servicemembers how to identify radicalization to violent Islamist extremism and to distinguish this ideology from the peaceful practice of Islam,” the report states.
The report claims that the Defense Department’s alleged failure to identify the threat of Islamic extremism “explicitly and directly conflicts with (the Pentagon’s) history of directly confronting white supremacism and other threatening activity among servicemembers.”
It recommends that the Pentagon “revise its policies and training in order to confront the threat of Islamist extremism directly.”
At the same time, the report says the FBI faces a series of “internal challenges — which may include cultural barriers — that can frustrate … ongoing institutional reforms” designed in part to facilitate better intelligence sharing.
The report criticizes an FBI inquiry on Hasan for focusing “narrowly on whether (he) was engaged in terrorist activity — as opposed to whether he was radicalizing … and whether this radicalization might pose counterintelligence or other threats.”
The report by Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins is a departure from the scrambling by the mainstream media and politicians to avoid any mention of Islam or jihad. This document at least calls attention to the role of “homegrown Islamic extremism,” unlike a New York Times report that insisted Hasan’s and his motive “remain an enigma.”
Army officials “valued the diversity of having a Muslim psychiatrist,” but Nidal Malik Hasan could only have broadcast his intentions more clearly if he wore a blinking, green neon sign over his head that said “I’m going to kill you.” He more or less did just that with his now infamous PowerPoint presentation which discussed jihadist doctrine at length and openly declared: “We [Muslims] love death more than you love life.”
For now, the report recommends that the Pentagon “revise its policies and training in order to confront the threat of Islamist extremism directly.” But even short of tackling chapter and verse, any such activity will be met with howls of “profiling” and “Islamophobia,” and resisted by Muslim sympathizers setting policies within the Pentagon.
The price of continued inaction and half-measures may be another massacre. “Report: FBI, Army failures preceded Fort Hood massacre,” by Charley Keys and Alan Silverleib for CNN, February 3:
Washington (CNN) — FBI and Army officials repeatedly ignored multiple warning signs that could have prevented the November 2009 massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, according to a long-awaited report released Thursday by two U.S. senators.
The inability to act was a result of both bureaucratic inefficiency and an unwillingness to identify and confront homegrown Islamic extremism, the report concludes.
Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan is accused in the shootings, which left 13 people dead and 32 wounded. He faces a likely court-martial and potential death penalty.
Thursday’s report — titled “A Ticking Time Bomb” — was written by Sens. Joseph Lieberman, I-Connecticut, and Susan Collins, R-Maine. Lieberman is the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee; Collins is the committee’s top Republican.
“Although neither the Department of Defense nor the FBI had specific information concerning the time, place, or nature of the attack, they collectively had sufficient information to have detected Hasan’s radicalization to violent Islamist extremism but failed both to understand and to act on it,” the report says.
“Our investigation found specific and systemic failures in the government’s handling of the Hasan case and raises additional concerns about what may be broader systemic issues.”
Among other things, the report notes that a FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force had learned that Hasan was communicating with a suspected terrorist and flagged his communications for “further review.” A second task force, however, subsequently dismissed the evidence and “dropped the matter rather than cause a bureaucratic confrontation.”
Hasan reportedly communicated by e-mail with radical Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki’s name is not included in the publicly released version of the report.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon “possessed compelling evidence that Hasan embraced views so extreme that it should have disciplined him or discharged him from the military, but (Defense officials) failed to take action against him,” the report says.
Damning:
It concludes that Hasan’s military officer evaluation reports were “sanitized” to minimize his “obsession with violent Islamic extremism.”
“It is clear from this failure that (the Pentagon) lacks (an) institutional culture … sufficient to inform commanders and all levels of servicemembers how to identify radicalization to violent Islamist extremism and to distinguish this ideology from the peaceful practice of Islam,” the report states.
The report claims that the Defense Department’s alleged failure to identify the threat of Islamic extremism “explicitly and directly conflicts with (the Pentagon’s) history of directly confronting white supremacism and other threatening activity among servicemembers.”
It recommends that the Pentagon “revise its policies and training in order to confront the threat of Islamist extremism directly.”
At the same time, the report says the FBI faces a series of “internal challenges — which may include cultural barriers — that can frustrate … ongoing institutional reforms” designed in part to facilitate better intelligence sharing.
The report criticizes an FBI inquiry on Hasan for focusing “narrowly on whether (he) was engaged in terrorist activity — as opposed to whether he was radicalizing … and whether this radicalization might pose counterintelligence or other threats.”
President Obama’s oil spill commission spent six months examining the “root causes” of the Gulf disaster, yet never inspected the failed blowout preventer — the part of the well that could have, as its name suggests, prevented the explosion.
At a House Natural Resources Committee hearing this week, the co-chairmen of the National Oil Spill Commission faced a barrage of questions from Republicans and Democrats about why their final report is long on regulatory recommendations but short on engineering explanations.
Lawmakers took issue with the commission’s apparent lack of effort to explain the failure of the blowout preventer. Republicans said it calls into question the commission’s recommendations — and, more seriously, leaves the Gulf vulnerable to a similar malfunction in the future.
“Why should we take [the commission] seriously if [it] did not even make that modicum of effort to determine the actual cause of the disaster?” asked Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.). “We’ve never had a blowout failure like this one. Until we find out why it failed, it could happen again. It could happen anytime — and the commission has not advanced our understanding of how to prevent that. … We have before us a report recommending bureaucratic solutions to engineering problems authored by bureaucrats rather than an engineering solution authored by engineers.”Up until Wednesday’s hearing, the oil spill commission has largely avoided sharp questioning. Its 381-page final report on “The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling” was released earlier this month, the result of six months of research.
Republican lawmakers expressed alarm that the commission — made up of Obama appointees who lack engineering experience — would offer recommendations without attempting to identify the precise mechanical cause of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion.
“We still don’t know what caused the explosion,” said Natural Resources Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.). “We don’t know how or why the blowout preventer malfunctioned.”
Commission co-chairman and former Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) responded: “It is true that no one at this point has had the benefit of a full examination of the blowout preventer. What we do know is that it didn’t perform as it should have.”
When Obama created the commission last May, its top priority was to “examine the relevant facts and circumstances concerning the root causes of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster.”
The commission’s report heavily explores the human error and managerial mistakes behind the spill — again, at the relative expense of exploring the technological causes. It could have done both, McClintock said, citing the work of the Rogers Commission, which examined the causes of the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
“When the Challenger exploded, people only knew one thing for sure after the accident — that this was a launch that was fatal and catastrophic,” he said. “The Rogers Commission was a panel that was filled with technical experts that painstakingly recovered the wreckage from underneath the ocean and reassembled that wreckage and then determined the precise cause of the disaster. It then recommended changes so that the space program could move forward.”
Commission co-chairman William Reilly deflected criticism and defended the report. Reilly, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator, drew an interesting analogy.
“I think you can draw an analogy between a blowout preventer and a seatbelt in an automobile accident,” Reilly said. “It’s obviously important to the survival of someone that a seatbelt wasn’t fastened, but it doesn’t really explain why the accident occurred. We explain why the accident occurred. We identified all the major contributors. … Examining the blowout preventer is not going to cause those other factors that we have covered to go away. They are there, they are distressing and they do have implications for policy.”
Those policy implications worry some committee members. The report’s imbalance suggests a desire to limit the capabilities of the oil industry, which is evident from the phrase “systemic, industry-wide failure” — without examples from more than three companies to back up its use. In fact, the report implies the need for a complete governmental overhaul of the industry when no such overhaul is needed.
“Here’s the issue,” Rep. Bill Flores (R-Tex.) said. “Congress has considered legislation, the Department of Interior has issued new regulations, lease sales have been canceled, other areas of potential offshore activity have been put off-limits again and it’s all based on a report that doesn’t give a full post-mortem of what happened.”
Even committee Democrats questioned the report’s most sweeping claim.
“Some of the verdicts, sometimes even just the words used in the report, I kind of have some concerns about,” said Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.). “One was the use of the term ‘systemic,’ that there are ‘systemic’ problems in the industry. If you look at a 30-year history, over the last 30 years, the history of the offshore oil industry, there have been some incidents, but I think a major incident is very rare and, if you compare it with the airline industry or the consumer trade industry, the oil and gas industry has done quite a good job.”
But Reilly and Graham stood behind this conclusion. While the report only cites as safety offenders three companies, those companies are highly prevalent in the industry, they said.
“It is simply inconceivable to us that this is a problem so exclusive, so especially circumstantial to one rig,” Reilly said.
That perspective is likely to shape future policymaking, a point that wasn’t lost on Flores. “This report is being relied upon to continue moratoria, either de facto or regulatory or however they want to be described, and it goes back to this ‘systemic, industry-wide’ failure comment.”
Going one step further, Flores asked the commission to remove the phrase from its report.
“Based on what I see, and the weight which this report is being given for the energy future of this country, I would respectfully ask the commission to remove from the report the phrase, ‘systemic, industry-wide failure.”
The New York TImes reported that the shootings in Tucson earlier this month “complicated plans” for the annual Shot Show convention in Las Vegas this week — the largest gun trade show in the nation — and that as of Wednesday, “there was little discussion of the events as the crowd surveyed this year’s wares.” ThinkProgress attended the convention and asked many gun enthusiasts there if they had heard any talk about Tucson. Nearly all we spoke to said it hasn’t been a topic of conversation. “I have not heard one thing about that,” one woman said. Another man said he was “shocked” that the incident had been all but ignored at the show:
ATTENDEE: I’ve asked about that myself. No one is talking about that. No one.
TP: Why do you think that is?
ATTENDEE: I don’t know. I’m shocked by it you know, this is a huge show. This is far bigger than anything. I go to the Safari Club convention every year either in Dallas or in Reno. It’s a big hunting convention and this is the first time I’ve ever come to the SHOT Show and I thought with all of what happened last week that there would be some kind of a dampening or what not. Absolutely nothing. No one talks about it.
Watch a compilation of clips from the interviews:
