Krugman's article on Obama and the spill

The Gulf is one of the most productive fishing areas on the planet. Now the industry is screwed for years. Much of Gulf fishing is done by small, immigrant operations that don't have the scale to weather this disaster. If I were them, I would take truckloads of rotting seafood and dump them at BP USA's headquarters. Let's see how they like another industry shitting on their livelihood.

G was kind enough to send me a piece from Krugman about Obama and GOP criticism over his handling of the spill: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/opinion/10krugman.html.

Did you see the press conference today? I agree with Krugman that Obama has done about all he reasonably can for the spill. The government doesn't have the know-how or equipment to fix drilling disasters. I guess he could threaten BP and make them hurry up, but based on their track record, do you want to rush a reckless, accident-prone company into another mistake? Obama could have mustered up more anti-spill resources and pulled rank on BP for the cleanup though. Recruit the fishing boats, get all the booms and vacuums you can requisition. Overwhelming force to silence the critics and put people at ease, even if it's not fixing the problem 100%. Apparently 7 nations have offered us help, but we only accepted it from 2: Mexico and Norway (a nation with vast offshore drilling experience in worse waters, yet with a better safety record). But he still did much better than Bush during Katrina.

As Krugman and Obama have said, I don't know why there is such a blanket anti-government sentiment among conservatives. Reagan said government is the problem, but government is the solution (and the unique solution) for many things too. Do they really not care that America lost trillions in wealth due to de-regulation, that hundreds of people are dead due to gutted, corrupt federal inspection agencies, and that we are stuck in 2 un-winnable wars because the separation of powers failed? Bad, dysfunctional government is a problem, so why not fix it instead of weaken it more? They are sending our concept of government to a "death panel". Just because of the Toyota pedal problem, do critics say that all cars are bad and we should do away with them? You can't judge something based on its worst performance (also a critique of our penal system). And you especially can't judge when you set up something to fail beforehand for your own selfish purposes. If they don't want government, then what is their alternative? Every man for himself? We'd just be a nation of paranoid, selfish assholes stealing from and lying to each other. Is that their American dream? Is that conservatism? Freedom must go hand-in-hand with personal responsibility, as any GOP would say. But clearly personal responsibility is fallible, so who is there to enforce it but the government and rule of law?

More on the MMS:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127126854

In one case, it was reported that a MMS inspector gave his inspection form to a rep of the company being audited. He filled out the questions in pencil, and the MMS guy just wrote over in pen. Another was being recruited to a company at the very moment that he/she was auditing the company. Needless to say the company passed and he/she got a new job.