Navy Flight Team Brings Hope To Oil-fouled Beach

WKRG.com, 7/8/2010 - Pensacola Beach, Florida (AP): Six U.S. Navy Blue Angels aviators hope to cheer up Panhandle residents dealing with the massive BP oil spill. ∴ The Blue Angels annual Pensacola Beach Air Show starts Friday with formal practice. The main event is Saturday. The team held an informal practice Thursday. ∴ The men who fly he six F/A-18 Super Hornets said they understand how concerned area residents area about the oil and tar that has reached the area's once pristine white beaches because they also live in the community. ∴ The pilots said they hope he show will raise spirits and provide a much-needed boost to beach businesses.

Gotta love those Naval aviators! :-) --bc Read More......

Tocqueville on the BP Spill

LIBERTYCENTRAL.ORG, 6/18/2010 by Brian Faughnan (via The New Ledger, et. al) - ...Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw the collision between big government and quick, decisive action, and wrote about it in Democracy in America. Tocqueville observed that by its very nature, big government makes responding to problems like the Gulf oil spill more difficult. As Tocqueville observed:

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

There are many virtues to a limited central government. But as we see in the case of the stopped barges, one is that big government inherently hampers the creativity and ingenuity of millions of Americans. And the fact that the story of the barges is not a national headline shows that our culture has largely come to accept this as the norm. After all, if it were shocking that the Coast Guard had stopped disaster response teams over some minor rule, it would be leading the news nationwide. Instead, many Americans accept that this is normal. That’s a sign of how bad the situation is. Read More......

WSJ: The 'Paralyzing' Principle

WALL STREET JOURNAL/Review & Outlook, 6/21/2010 - The Gulf disaster rehabilitates a discredited idea. The Gulf oil spill is having all sorts of nasty consequences well beyond damage to the regional environment and economy. Not least, the resulting political panic seems to be rehabilitating the thoroughly discredited theory of regulation known as the precautionary principle. ∴ This principle holds that government should attempt to prevent any risk—regardless of the costs involved, however minor the benefits and even without understanding what those risks really are. Developed in the late 1960s, this theory served as the intellectual architecture for the Environmental Protection Agency, which is still required to eliminate certain environmental risks no matter how expensive or pointless the effort is. ∴ This same mentality is now prompting not merely tighter safety standards, but President Obama's moratorium on all new deep water drilling, shutting down dozens of Gulf and Alaskan projects, maybe permanently. Last month, 26 Democrats demanded that the government fold up BP's other major Gulf operation, Atlantis, "to ensure that the explosion and mishap of the Horizon platform are not replicated." Read more at WSJ...

Jim Huffman (R), candidate for U.S. Senate, commented on this article: We need policies that weigh and balance risks... Read More......

Obama’s ‘battle plan’

NEWS FROM THE HILL, 6/15/2010 by Ben Geman and Sam Youngman - President Barack Obama sought to seize political control of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill Tuesday by laying out plans to ensure BP makes coastal residents whole while offering a broader pledge to rebuild the region and curb U.S. oil reliance. Read more at The Hill... Read More......

WP: Obama pledges sweeping climate change legislation

WASHINGTON POST, 6/2/2010 by Michael D. Sheer - PITTSBURGH -- President Obama on Wednesday promised to find the votes for comprehensive climate change legislation in the "coming months," saying the case for putting a price on the nation's addiction to carbon has been made clear by the environmental catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. ∴ In a speech at Carnegie Mellon University released by the White House, the president repeated his intentions to roll back billions of dollars in tax breaks on big oil companies, tap natural gas reserves as an alternative to oil, and increase reliance on nuclear power. Read more at the Washington Post... Read More......

Politics In Criticizing Cleanup, Jindal Finds His Voice

FOXNEWS, 6/2/2010 - PORT FOURCHON, La. — In the gathering frustration over failures to stop the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has emerged as one of the staunchest critics of the response by the federal government and BP PLC. ∴ Nearly every day, the Republican policy wonk pulls on his brown cowboy boots and traipses across a newly oiled shore, or takes a boat through fouled waters. Along the way, he often lambastes BP's and the federal government's efforts as "too little, too late" for communities scrambling to protect their fragile wetlands from encroaching crude—comments that have drawn sharp criticism from the White House and some Democratic lawmakers. ∴ Louisiana has jurisdiction over its coastline, but none in the federal waters of the Gulf. Read more at FOX/NYT...

Related:
NEW YORK POST: I can plug oil leak, says NY genius - BP's engineers can't stop the gushing oil spill, but a young genius from Long Island says she found the solution in less time than it takes most people to finish a crossword puzzle. Read More......